


All The Stars In Texas

by southspinner



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - 1930s, Car Sex, Dark!Marco, Eye Trauma, General debauchery all over on this one folks, Hemophobia, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Not only Dark!Marco but 1930's Dark!Marco with a tommy gun and a Texas drawl, Strap in kiddies it's gonna be a bumpy ride, bonnie and clyde au, lots of violence and guns involved, mechanic jean
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-17
Updated: 2017-03-20
Packaged: 2018-02-17 18:15:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 28
Words: 244,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2318762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/southspinner/pseuds/southspinner
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Marco Bodt has always wanted to make the history books and has come to the conclusion that infamy looks far better on him than fame. Jean Kirschtein has always wanted to get out of Depression-ridden West Dallas and chase his dreams. A chance meeting throws the spark that sets Texas on fire, and what started as something simple becomes a dangerous game of love, lust, and the birth of living legends.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Marco

_July, 1934_

 

I never did know how to apologize.

That’s more of a crime than it seems when you’re growing up on a lonely, sad little scrap of a farm a few miles outside of Telico and everything is church on Sundays and wearing clothes that belonged to two of your brothers before you because wastefulness is a sin along with everything else and your voice grows heavy with “Yes, Ma, yes, Pa,” and “I know I should be grateful, I am grateful.” The lies stick along your tongue and make every word you say feel gritty and sick. You break if you weren’t broken already.

Maybe my old man was right and I’ve always been a lost cause. I couldn’t apologize for sneaking the rifle out from above the mantle and shooting cans off fenceposts in the pasture when I was six any more than I could apologize for kissing some boy whose name I don’t even remember now in the alley behind the hardware store when I was sixteen. I couldn’t apologize when my little sister saw everything and ran home with her mouth shooting off before I could stop her. I couldn’t apologize when I was standing in the middle of a dirt road with a hastily-packed suitcase and more bruises than I could count.

_Our son is dead._

The hell he is. I lived. I’m not sorry.

Four years later, I couldn’t apologize for the circumstances that led to handcuffs around my wrists and the dirty insides of a jail cell.

The thing about prison is that it’s not supposed to be comfortable. Something to do with an environment that makes you regret what you did to get there. Like sending a little kid that nipped from the cookie jar to time out.

Or a twenty-year-old that robbed two or five gas stations. Semantics, really.

At any rate, the McLennan County Jail was never designed for comfort, but it’s something that can be gotten used to after a few months. It doesn’t really hit home until you’re scrabbling around on the dusty ground in the oppressive summer heat at some ungodly hour of the night going at a steel bar with a nail file like your life depends on it.

“Would you hurry up?” The hissed whisper barely makes it over the teeth-aching drag of steel on steel. “They’ll be making another round God-knows-when and if they find you messin’ around down there--”

“And I’d be getting this over with faster if you’d do something other than run your yap, Connie,” I snap back, knuckles rubbed raw from repeated contact against the unyielding surface of the bar. Three long nights of work and not much to show for it other than two thin lines at the bottom and top of the aged, rusting steel. The one small perk of only being a petty criminal instead of someone like Al Capone or Jesse James is that it makes busting out of jail a hell of a lot easier. The one tiny block of cells in the place is lucky to see one patrol a night if the guard’s not too drunk to get out of his chair, and that’s fine by me, given the fact that Connie and I would both be in deep trouble if we didn’t have that lax security and Bert’s snoring the next cell over to cover up the grinding sound of the file.

“Well, you’re the one that told me to be the lookout,” Connie grumbles, glaring down at me from his bunk.

“And the whole pretense of a lookout is that you _only talk if someone’s coming_ , you goof.”

“No need to get so offended, I’m only trying to help.”

“Connie. Shut up.” Groaning under my breath, I lean forward until my forehead is resting against the cell door, the burning ache from my overworked arm starting to spread out across my shoulder and down my back. Most people would be regretting walking into that gas station with a .45 about now.

I can’t. Not when every movie in Telico I could smooth talk my way into as a kid was about Jesse James and Billy The Kid, how the West was won and the guns in the hands of the outlaws that won it.

 _Our son is dead._ Good luck saying that when he’s staring back at you from the front page of the paper, from the insides of history books.

But maybe Connie is regretting it. Maybe that’s why he’s so on-edge as he watches from his bunk like a flustered little owl. I’ve been toting him around since we were kids, and I still remember the look on his face when the guns stopped being toys and the stakes climbed higher, remember the rush in my own veins driving down a dirt road with sirens fading steadily farther away. I never did know how to apologize.

So maybe Connie Springer was a good kid once. Maybe his bad apple of a best friend corrupted him. Maybe it should be some other idiot here in the big house with me while Connie’s out living his life like an upstanding citizen, but that’s just not how it played out, and I can’t help but be a little glad for that as the bar finally gives way with a metallic clang and I slump back against the wall, covered in a sheen of sweat and panting.

Connie hops down from his bunk with eyes wide as saucers, shifting his weight nervously back and forth. “Oh, Christ. Oh, Christ, Marco, this was a bad idea.”

“I’m the king of bad ideas,” I smirk breathlessly, angling my feet through the widened space between the bars and starting to pray for all my long-time sinner’s soul is worth that it’ll be enough, out into the hallway up to my knees, my hips, my chest.

Up to the place where my shoulders get stuck and I can’t move either forward or backward. “Oh shit.”

“See, what’d I tell you?! You’re gonna get stuck there and they’ll come around before long and then we’re both--”

“Connie! Don’t blow your wig over a minor snag, all right, just get over here.” Taking deep breaths to ready myself for the only solution we’ve got, I let my eyes drift shut for a moment before looking back at him. “I need you to dislocate my shoulder.”

He looks at me like I’ve just told him to shoot someone. “What?”

“Just do it! You’re smaller than me, you can fit through just fine, but we ain’t getting me out of this thing unless my shoulder gets through.” Gritting my teeth, I give one last halfhearted tug at the bars, already resigned to it. I’ve suffered more pain for less of a reason.

_Our son is dead._

When I met up with Connie by pure coincidence two years later, he looked at me like I was a ghost. They went the whole nine yards, had a funeral and buried an empty coffin on the family plot.

Marco got caught under a tractor. Poor boy was too mangled for a wake.

Look at me now, Pa. Look at me now.

Connie sucks in a breath and kneels down next to me, bracing a hand against either side of my shoulder. “You sure about this?”

“Hell, _I_ could do this faster than you are, get on with it.”

“All right, all right. On three.”

He lunges forward on ‘one’ with the most god-awful popping noise I’ve ever heard, and somewhere between the hollow of my chest and my lips the agonizing scream turns into a peal of manic laughter, bouncing off the dirty concrete. My foot stomps repeatedly against the floor like I could grind out the pain under my shoe, loud enough that we’re probably damn lucky that there’s the muffled strains of a radio slipping under the door at the other end of the cell block.

“You crazy bastard.” For all his hesitance at the beginning, Connie doesn’t seem to waste much time in shoving me the rest of the way through into the open hallway before shimmying through the open space himself and grabbing for my shoulder again. “All right, gotta make this quick, and for God’s sake keep it down this time.”

My shoulder goes back into place with another hideous noise and a muffled yell colliding with the backs of my clenched teeth, and two seconds later we’re on our feet, looking frantically back and forth between the door at the end of the cell block and the bar-covered window a few feet over our heads. Two equally dangerous options. “All right, which way are we thinking?”

“Well, we don’t have time to file the bars off the window, and the boys up front have guns,” Connie deadpans, fists clenching subtly at his sides. “So I’m thinking what I’ve been telling you since this shit show started. We’re _fucked_.”

“No we ain’t, just calm down and let me think,” I mutter, starting to pace.

“Y’all better stop thinking and make tracks, or you’ll be doing your thinking in a new cell with a couple extra years on your sentence,” Bert deadpans from the cell next to our busted-up one, now very much awake thanks to the noise from my impromptu shoulder surgery. “Nothing around here for miles. You’ll want to be up the road before sunup.”

“Which is what I’ve been telling Connie for days, but you see where that got us.” Frowning, I take one last look from the door to the window, trying to figure out some solution. When we were kids, I could talk Connie and myself out of almost anything with a winning smile and some seat-of-the-pants lie that slipped far too easily from a child’s lips for grown-ups to ever believe it. It’s a little hard to sweet-talk your way through concrete and steel, though. These are not our bygone days of shoplifting dime store candy and climbing up the trees in Old Man Henderson’s orchard to steal apples.

Or maybe I’m wrong.

Something clicks almost audibly in my head, and I wave Connie over hurriedly, looking up at the window over our heads. “Springer, give me a leg up.”

“Oh, you strong enough to bend steel now, Marco? Because that would’ve been dead useful when--”

“Shut up and do it!”

Even though Connie’s grumbling when he finally does kneel down and lace his hands together into a sturdy resting place for my foot, it’s the same practiced motion of our childhood, steady and secure enough that I don’t even wobble as I lean against the cold solidity of the wall and peer through the grimy window. A few seconds of silence, and then I burst into another too-loud laugh, hopping back down to the floor and gritting my teeth against the impact jarring painfully up through my shoulder. “I’ll be goddamned. The bars on the window are a grate bolted to the outside, and those bolts are rusted all to hell.”

“Yeah, and?” Connie snipes.

“And,” I tell him, scooping up the filed-off steel bar from the floor and twirling it around like a baton. “We’re getting out of here. Hoist me up again.”

Someone has the good graces to cough over the sound of me busting out the window and banging at the rusted bolts, sending the little chips of metal spinning down to the ground six or seven feet below followed by the metallic thud of the grate hitting the ground. Connie and I take a few seconds to switch places - he’ll have to pull me up since my shoulder might not hold the weight - and I turn back around to look at the cell block with a shit-eating smirk, all the rest of the inmates wide awake by now. “Happy trails, boys.”

“You idiots’ll be back here in a week,” Bert snorts, lighting a cigarette and raising it to me in some mockery of a toast. “Run fast, Bodt.”

“I always do,” I reply, hopping down to the dusty ground outside with another bolt of pain up through my shoulder. McClennan County was poor even before the Depression hit, and it shows in the sad state of affairs that the jail is in, one guard tower and a sagging, tired-looking fence topped with rusty, blunted barbed wire. This won’t even be anything to brag about.

“So are we just taking the fence as-is?” Connie whispers as the two of us hunker down around the corner from the guard tower, but I’m too busy timing the slow back-and-forth sweep of the lone searchlight to pay attention to him. Quiet. Lackadaisical. No shouting or alarms. They don’t know we’re gone yet. If we’re really lucky, they might not know until morning. Connie punches me in my wounded shoulder. “Marco!”

“That hurt, you little shit,” I hiss back, stomping down hard on his foot and clapping a hand over his mouth when he goes to let out a yell. “We got no choice but to just go headlong over the fence. No wire cutters, no buffer to throw over the top, no time. Besides, look how blunt that stuff is. Most you’ll get’s a hole in your shirt.”

Connie swallows hard. “I sure hope so.”

“You scared?” I laugh a little breathlessly.

“Aren’t you?”

“Hell, no. I’m excited.” Bouncing slightly on the balls of my feet, I look back at him with a wide grin. “You hear John Dillinger busted out of an escape-proof joint up in Indiana a few months ago? This is child’s play, Connie. If he can do it, so can we.”

“Yeah, and John Dillinger also got gunned down in an alley last week, so forgive me for not being as jazzed as you are,” he gulps, cracking his knuckles and sucking in a breath.

Silence. A warm, dusty gust of wind. The sound of crickets. The searchlight reaches the end of its cycle.

“Fifteen seconds! Go!” Taking off at a sprint, I tug Connie after me, making a break for the fence and hitting the old chain link at top speed, hands and feet scrambling for purchase.

Being smaller than me and having two fully-functioning shoulders gives Connie the advantage. He vaults gracefully over the barbed wire before I’m even halfway up, landing in a little cloud of dust on the other side. Eight more seconds until I’m smack in the middle of a searchlight. I steady myself on the wobbling metal mesh and let out a curse. Seven. Head upwards with every ounce of strength I’ve got left in me. Six. Five. Four. Connie whispers something frantic that I don’t hear. Three.

I go to swing over the fence with two seconds left, but my shoulder gives out at the top of my arc, bringing my weight crashing down on top of the coil of barbed wire. I was right about its bluntness, but one sharp little spike of metal still manages to carve a long, shallow cut across my stomach as I tumble over to the other side, landing hard on my back enough to knock the wind painfully from my lungs. The stars are almost unnaturally bright as I stare up at them through the haze of the searchlight passing over my head. The sky as seen by a free man.

“You oughta look into Olympic gymnastics, brother,” Connie snickers, and I reach up to smack him across the back of the head as I remember how to breathe again, waiting for the searchlight to complete another cycle before I roll up onto my knees.

“Run,” I wheeze, waving towards the gleaming pinprick of the North star. “Run.”

And we do.

* * *

The miles pass like a rabbit’s heartbeat, fleeting and jumpy, skittering through the darkness with wide eyes and held breaths at every noise. We head North, away from the danger that comes with being near Waco’s higher population and more concentrated police forces, but that comes at the cost of wandering dirt roads in pitch darkness. There isn’t much between McClennan County and Dallas other than desolate farms and empty fields, no real cover or places to hide, but we at least have the small fortune of not encountering anyone for the first few hours, sticking to the tall, dry stalks of grass clinging to the dusty earth.

“You got any idea whereabouts we are?” Connie groans, the interruption of the quiet we’ve maintained making me jump. “I wanna be home already. Sleep in a real bed, have myself a hot meal, see my wife…”

“Your wife’s like to skin you alive when she sees you’ve busted out of jail. I wouldn’t want you to get your hopes up,” I scoff, rubbing at my sore shoulder and finally stopping to take a breath. “And I’m not sure. We’ve probably made it at least ten miles.”

“How many miles between Waco and Dallas?”

“Around a hundred, I figure.”

Connie slumps to the ground with a defeated expression, running a hand back over his close-cropped hair. “Well, shit.”

“We ain’t getting there any faster by you sitting on your ass,” I snap, hauling him up by the back of his shirt collar and looking around. “We need to find shelter before the sun’s up, anyway. First sight someone catches of us, we’re right back in the big house.”

“I know, I know.” He looks and sounds like a petulant child, dragging his feet along behind me as we cut across barren fields, kicking up dust in our wake and biting back coughs. Exhaustion pulls at my bones, but Connie’s so dead on his feet that he runs right into me when I stop short, looking at the silhouette of a farmhouse against the gray-tinged sky of almost morning. “What? Why are we stopping?”

I don’t give him a straight answer, just purse my lips and tug him forward by the wrist. “Come on.”

“Marco, what in the high holy hell!”

Growling in exasperation, I finally round on him, fatigue and the pain from my shoulder driving me to one notch short of landing a right hook to his jaw. “Look at yourself, Connie! Look at the both of us! We’re covered in dirt and walking around in prison clothes. We just waltz into West Dallas looking like this, what do you think’ll happen?”

He blinks at me silently for a second, tilts his head to the side.

“Don’t bother thinking, I can already smell something burning,” I mutter, stalking off across the field without him.

Connie gets the picture after a few seconds, jogs to catch up with me. “So we break into someone’s house and hope they’ll be nice enough to give the passing convicts a change of clothes?”

“Look at the _door_ , you twit.” He’s at least got the mental capacity to look where I’m pointing, squinting through the darkness at the stark white square of a piece of paper nailed to the door. “Eviction notice. The bank took the farm. Even if there’s nothing left inside, it’s still somewhere to hide out for the day.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, _oh_.” If my eyes rolled any farther, I’d be staring at the inside of my head.

Now secure in the knowledge that we won’t be walking straight into someone storming out onto their porch with a shotgun to meet us, Connie practically scampers up to the house, peering in through the dirty windows. “Yup, looks like nobody’s home. Couple boxes sitting in the front room by the looks of it. Maybe some clothes if we’re lucky.”

Since when have we been lucky? I stopped believing in luck the day my life came crashing down around my head. Something in me went bitter and cold in the wake of finding myself sixteen and staring down the gaping maw of the world with an empty stomach and empty hands. It was hard to believe that there was anything out there on my side after weeks of drifting from town to town with nothing to aim for other than survival. My lack of capacity for optimism might come from my own circumstances, but after the night we’ve had, I’m not about to crush Connie’s hope. Instead, I just nod sleepily as he kneels down next to the door, fiddling with the knob.

“All right, looks like a simple enough lock, if we can find a pocket knife or something lying around I should be able to--”

Determination to preserve my idiot best friend’s sense of childlike wonder or no, I’m tired and growing antsier the higher the sun climbs into the sky. I give him a few seconds to mess with the lock before shoving him out of the way, bracing myself against the porch railing, and kicking the damn thing halfway off its hinges. “Done.”

As it turns out, maybe there is some luck in the world. The boxes in the living room are full of clothes - a little big on Connie and a little small on me, but better than black and white stripes any day - and more importantly, the key to our salvation sitting out back.

“So the bank took the car, too?” Connie asks as I’m poking around under the hood of the Model T.

“Looks like it,” I shrug, frowning and sticking my hand down beside the engine. “I sure as hell ain’t complaining.”

“Well, no, but…” he trails off, raising an eyebrow. “Hey, what are you doing?”

“I’m starting the car.”

Connie looks almost appalled. “So we break into these folks’ house and take their clothes, and now you’re hot wiring their car?”

“What’re they gonna do, send me to prison?” I smirk, exulting in the sound of the engine rattling to life. “Besides, Connie, I’m not doing anything too morally reprehensible.”

“You don’t figure?”

“No, I don’t,” I shake my head, grinning even wider. “Technically, I’m not stealing this car from hardworking citizens. I’m stealing it from the bank. Now get in. You wanna see your girl before the day’s out or not?”

There’s a certain sense of liberation inherent in the hum of the engine vibrating through the steering wheel and into my bones, dust kicking up as the two of us burn rubber up the dirt road from the foreclosed farm. Connie’s been riding shotgun with me through two years of broken speed limits and rushed getaways, but that doesn’t stop him from gripping the dashboard like a lifeline every time I whip around a curve. “D’you have to go so damn fast?”

“Do you have to tell me how to drive?” I counter, steering with my knee long enough to finish rolling the sleeves of my stolen shirt up around my elbows. “How many tight spots have I gotten us out of with a vehicle? Put me behind a wheel and I’m unstoppable.”

The engine dies a mile outside of Dallas.

“Don’t say anything,” I groan, leaning forward and resting my forehead against the steering wheel.

“Wasn’t planning on it,” Connie says sharply, hopping out of the passenger side “I’m walking home, and you’re figuring out something to do until I get the missus calmed down enough to accept your presence.”

“You’re _joking_ ,” I gape.

“I’m as far from joking as I can possibly get,” he seethes, brushing the dust off his oversized pants and trying to look dignified while hiking them up almost to his chest. “It was your idea to bust out. Your idea to steal the car. _Your idea to rob the goddamned gas station in the first place._ So you can lie in the bed you made for a few hours, Marco; that is the _least_ you can do while I try to get all this shit that _you started_ sorted out.”

“Et tu, Brute?” I grumble, glaring out the window at him.

“I don’t speak Spanish!” And without another word, Connie turns on his heel and stomps off up the road.

I sit there in a daze until he’s nothing but a speck on the horizon, staring out the gritty windshield at the open, empty road. The sun is rising to the East, and it’s not too hot yet, but within an hour or two the Texas summer will be in full swing. And I’ll be sitting here. On the side of the road in a dead-as-a-doornail Model T. Fuming under my breath, I fling open the driver’s side door and stalk around to the front of the car to fling up the hood. Lots of black smoke and acrid smells.

“Goddammit,” I whisper almost disbelievingly, numb for a moment before the utter rage at the unfairness of it all settles in my veins and I kick hard enough at the front tire to send a bloom of pain up my leg. “God _dammit!_ ”

A little cloud of dust kicks up in the distance, and I’m not stupid enough to hope that it’s Connie having a change of heart and coming back. Despite the fact that he’s an absolute bastard for leaving me out here, I can’t deny that I deserve it to some extent. He was an upstanding member of society before I came along, had himself a girl and a job and a _life_ , and maybe it was because I’d never known what it was to be that well-adjusted that it was so easy for me to drag him into a year of car chases and cash that we blew on God knows what. I had nothing to lose by getting myself thrown in prison. Connie lost more than he’s been willing to admit until now. Just because I don’t know how to apologize doesn’t mean I can’t feel remorse when it matters.

The dust cloud grows, heralding the arrival of a truck that’s more rust than anything else, the brakes giving an unholy screech when it stops beside me and its driver hops out onto the road. Roughly my age, maybe a bit younger, blond hair trimmed into a shaggy undercut that could do with a touch-up, a sort of unconscious swagger in his step that matches the brassy tenor of his voice when he walks over and nods down at the abysmal wreck of the Model T’s engine. “Car trouble?”

“Why on earth would you think that? I’m just stopping for a little rest,” I deadpan, already on-edge. Just because I’m not dressed like a fugitive anymore doesn’t make me safe, and there’s something incredibly perceptive in the newcomer’s tawny eyes that has my better judgement yelling at me to run. But taking off would draw more suspicion than I’m willing to risk, so I settle for evasive maneuvers instead and do what I do best - lie. “I’ll be all right. My friend’s up the road hunting down the nearest mechanic.”

“He won’t have much luck finding him,” he laughs, leaning against the side of his truck and digging a cigarette and a book of matches out of the pocket of his pants.

“That so?” I mumble, guarded. “Why not?”

“Because I’m the nearest mechanic.” His smile is more on the side of a smirk, lopsided but sort of endearing in its crookedness. He laughs again at the look on my face, striking the match on his thumbnail and lighting his smoke before sticking his hand in my direction. “Jean Kirschtein.”

“Marco,” I nod, shaking his hand and watching him intently. There’s something in the way he holds himself that doesn’t say blue-collar despite his claims of being a mechanic, no weary stoop to his shoulders and something the posture of someone who expects to be acknowledged, and the hand that grips mine doesn’t have calluses that match my own. Whoever Jean Kirschtein is, he doesn’t come from a lifetime of being up before the sun and working until you bleed. Not a farm boy for sure, but not a city boy either. He’s got a solid set to his spine and strong-looking shoulders that stretch as he leans down to peer through the smoke at the busted engine, and now is _not_ the time to be appreciating the aesthetic value of strangers, Bodt, Jesus Christ. “So, you think it’s salvageable?”

Jean stands back up and runs a hand through his hair, frowning down at the car. “I can fix it, but not here, and not without parts. Tell you what, I was just on my way home to grab some things I forgot. If you can give me ten minutes or so to do that, I’ll give you a lift into town to find your friend and we can tow this thing back to the shop?”

Well, Connie did tell me to find something to do. He never said what. And it’s better than sitting on the side of the road waiting for death.

“I’d appreciate it,” I grin, slamming the hood of the Model T shut and jumping up into the passenger side of his truck.

Jean Kirschtein the mechanic who acts more like a rich kid gives me a look that I know all too well as he climbs in the driver’s side and shuts the door behind him. Down. Back up. Little quirk of a smile. He thinks he’s being subtle, God bless him.

Connie can keep his picket fence and the salvageable wreckage of his life for a few more hours. There are some perks of freedom that I’ve been missing something awful.

 


	2. Jean

 

After being told for the vast majority of my life that I didn’t have a lick of common sense, I sort of just stopped listening.

Dad was always worse about it than anyone else, constantly blustering about compromising this family’s future with your stupid pipe dreams, Jean, and the ever-popular _don’t come crying to me when you realize that life ain’t a fairy tale, boy; I’ve been telling you that for years._

Ironic. It was actually the Depression that compromised my family’s future, and I couldn’t go crying to my father because it was him eating a bullet for breakfast the morning after my sixteenth birthday that made me realize life was anything but a fairy tale. So even if in the long run I never had a lick of common sense, I at least had enough of it to live.

Just not enough, apparently, to keep me from picking up strangers on the side of the road when I’m already thirty minutes late for work.

Marco, whose last name I never caught, is quiet for the duration of the drive. Polite, but quiet. Mostly sticks to one-word answers, stares out the window like there’s something important to see in all that swirling dust.

“So, where were y’all headed in from?” I ask, remembering he’d mentioned a friend.

“Waco.” One-word answer, yet again.

“Long trip. You head out before sunup?”

“Yup.”

I look over at him for a long moment, try to figure him out. The bags under his round hazel eyes and the slight slump to his shoulders say exhaustion, but there’s a sharpness in his gaze that’s more alert, more _alive_ than anything I’ve seen in the dried-up dirtball that calls itself West Dallas in a hell of a long time. It’s inherent in the way he keeps shifting his focus every few seconds, the way his hand has been resting on the door handle ever since he got in the truck. Not nervous, but vigilant. More freckles than a factory full of Raggedy Ann dolls, too; those stick out almost as much as the strange, flighty way he carries himself.

I don’t have enough common sense to realize that I should be looking where I’m driving, and the truck hits a pothole with a gut-lurching rattle, pitching us both forward in our seats. Marco just about jumps through the rusted-out ceiling, eyes widening as his grip on the door handle tightens.

“Sorry,” I rush out, jerking the wheel to the side even after the fact and lurching across the road. “Can’t see a damn thing with the dust. Paved roads don’t start ‘til you get into town.”

“S’fine.” I wonder if it takes practice, being able to carry on a legitimate conversation one word at a time. He slumps back into his seat after another moment, exhaling heavily and rubbing a hand along his jawline.

Pursing my lips, I listen to make sure the impact didn’t knock something off in the transmission before speeding back up and watching him again, just a passing glance this time, the dirt on his shirt, the mess of dark hair under a faded newsboy cap. “You look like you’ve had a hell of a day.”

Suddenly enough that I almost drive off the road again, Marco lets out a peal of laughter that bounces around the cab of the truck, leaning forward and slapping at his knee as his face splits into the first smile I’ve seen since I’ve met him. Something about my observation must really be hilarious, because he cackles for a good minute before turning back to me, still sputtering out little chuckles. “Pal, you got no idea.”

Five words. I feel oddly like I’ve just received a gift.

I know better than to think that anyone I happen to meet doesn't have it rough. The way things are now, everyone's lost something. Jobs. Homes. Dreams.

Fathers.

Still, that doesn't stop the little internal cringe that pulls somewhere in my gut as we turn a sharp corner and drive down an even rougher road up to the front of a tiny house on its last leg, the roof shedding shingles like a stray dog in summer and the porch sagging, letting out a weary groan beneath our feet when Marco and I hop out of the truck and head for the front door. A house as tired as the people who live in it.

“It’s me,” I call back the narrow front hallway boots grinding dust into the floorboards with every step. “I forgot--”

“Your lunch. I know.” My mother’s head pokes out from the kitchen before the rest of her, the fact that she’s skinnier than she used to be cast into sharp relief in a threadbare secondhand dress. Still pretty, though, the somewhat-faded memory of a woman who used to be the envy of the better part of East Texas despite there now being more gray than blonde in her hair and the raw, soap-cracked hands that used to go in for a manicure every two weeks. She still walks like she’s wearing designer heels even in bare feet, gliding down the hallway and handing me the lunch pail I’d run off and left on the table. “You’ll be late now. I was going to send it with Ninette later.”

“And I’d rather be late than have Nettie walking by herself on that road.” Shaking my head and grimacing at the idea, I lean down and press a kiss to her cheek. “Eren can live without me for a few more minutes.”

“And who’s this?”

Marco looks like a deer in the headlights for a beat, blinking quickly before he recovers his composure and settles into a soft smile, hurriedly taking off his hat and extending a hand in her direction. “‘Fraid I’m part of the reason he’s late. Had some car trouble up the road and your son was nice enough to help me out. Marco Bodt. Pleasure to meet you, ma’am.”

Mom positively _beams_ , shaking his hand in a delicate, practiced motion. The last time someone was such a gentleman to her, she was probably still wearing pearls and a mink stole. I go ahead and decide that I like Marco Bodt, who now has a last name, if for no other reason than that. “The pleasure’s all mine. I’m glad he found you. Lord knows it’s a hike into town from out here--”

_“Jean!”_

The screen door rattles open behind us, and a short, frantic blur blasts down the hall and attaches itself to my waist, the loss of momentum giving way to a weedy little eight-year-old in a dust-covered dress, blonde braided pigtails and a gap between her front teeth that makes her tongue hiss as it goes a million miles a minute. “Are you back?! Do you have the day off?! If you’re going back into town take me with you! I’m bored and you’re never here and you said you were going to take me to the movies!”

“Woah, slow it down a second,” I laugh, peeling my little sister off of me and ruffling the stray wisps of hair that have escaped her braids. Her knees and elbows are scraped, her breaths ragged like she’s been running for a while. Frowning, I reach down and run my fingers along the torn cotton collar of her worn-out dress. “You been fighting with Mr. Wagner’s boy again?”

“He pushed me first!”

 _“Ninette,”_ Mom hisses, a rant about what a lady does and does not do already on the horizon.

“He wouldn’t let me play baseball with him and the Reebs boys because he said there ain’t no girls in baseball, so I told him that he could take the bat and shove it where the sun don’t shine. Then he shoved me, so I punched him in the face. I hurt my hand, but then I had to run because there was more of ‘em than me.” Nettie shrugs, examining the dirt caked under her nails. Mom lets out a mortified gasp. Marco starts laughing so hard he has to grab the coat rack for support. It’s almost like Ninette hadn’t even noticed him standing there until now, tilting her head to the side and abandoning me to trot over and peer up at him, a fascinating new discovery. “Are you one of Jean’s friends?”

“Sure am,” he nods, using the same courtesy he extended to my mother when he reaches down and shakes her little, dirty hand. “Name’s Marco. Nice to meet you.”

Mom sort of hovers in the background, tutting over the state of Ninette’s clothes for a moment before looking up at the rest of us apologetically. “I need to go get her a fresh dress; give me a moment…”

Marco watches her walk back down the hall, making sure she’s out of earshot before he squats down to Ninette’s eye level, eyes glinting and a little smirk playing at his lips. “Show me how you hit him.”

She breaks into a gap-toothed grin and balls her hand up in a fist, doing an exaggerated wind-up like she’s getting ready to throw a fastball. “‘Bout like this, I reckon.”

“See, that’s why you got hurt,” Marco nods, placing a hand over her fist and gently prying her fingers apart. “Never throw a punch with your thumb inside your fist. You can up and break your own bones that way. Thumb on the _outside_ ,” he continues, adjusting her grip before backing away so she can see her own hand, “and you got more knuckles to hit with. Next time you break that little ankle-biter’s jaw ‘stead of your hand, all right?”

“All right,” she nods enthusiastically, but every trace of her smile dies when Mom comes back down the hall with the most uncomfortable, most undeniably _pink_ dress she owns. “Aw, _Ma_.”

“Go wash up and change, young lady, and then you and I are going over to the Wagner’s so you can apologize,” Mom snipes, giving Nettie a little push down the hall until she eventually sulks off into the bedroom they share. She looks at Marco and I like we’re afterthoughts, almost surprised that we’re still standing here. “You two should get going. The dust’ll only get worse the longer you wait.”

“If I didn’t know better I’d say you were trying to get rid of me,” I laugh, slipping my lunch pail over one arm and leaning down to pull her into a hug with the other. “Eren might keep me late tonight. I should be back before you put Nettie to bed.”

Speak of the frilly-dressed devil, she comes shuffling dejectedly out into the hall after a few more seconds, resignation in her posture but murder in her eyes. Marco laughs again, putting his hat back on and tipping it slightly to my mother and sister in succession. “Mrs. Kirschtein. Miss Ninette. It was good to meet y’all, but Jean and I both have business to get around to. Have a nice day.”

“You too, sweetie. Hope your car gets fixed up soon,” Mom smiles at him, heading back to the kitchen. Marco waits until her back is turned to hold up a fist and wink at Ninette, mouthing _thumb on the outside_ before he turns on his heel and ambles off the front porch. The last thing I see before I shut the front door behind me is my sister giggling and holding up her own chapped-knuckled hand in response.

“So, you’re a charmer when you’ve got half a mind to be,” I snort once we’re back in the truck, praying under my breath until the engine turns over and we’re headed back up the road in a cloud of dusty earth.

And it's right back to careful glances and thought-out answers, back to eyes fixed down the endless expanse of the road. "Your folks seem nice. Your little sister's cute."

"Ain't she a pistol?" I laugh, blowing a cloud of dust past the broken-down Model T and nudging the speedometer a little higher.

"Yeah," Marco nods, the corner of his mouth twitching up into a slanted line. "Reminds me a lot of my little sister."

It’s the first bit of real information he’s given me. I latch onto it more quickly than I probably should, grinning as I reach down to shift gears. "How old's yours? Nettie's eight."

Any trace of levity on his face dies. If I had more leeway to watch carefully, I might take note of how Marco practically crumples in his seat, spine bowing inwards like he's trying to curl around something in himself to keep it from escaping. But as it is, I only really process the twitch of sadness across his face, eyebrows knitting together as he peels fingers out of the fist clenched in his lap. One, two, three, four.

"She's ten," he says.

I think of the headlines about people in the big cities up north lining up for bread, about shanty-towns built of cardboard and the tired, empty-eyed men staring out from the cars every time a train rolls through the tracks laid along the other side of town, and I realize that I probably shouldn't have asked. "Ain't seen your folks in a while, then?"

"No." He shakes his head, voice soft and eyes out of focus. "No, not in a while."

"You been out looking for work?"

Almost like he's caught his own lapse, Marco sits up a bit straighter, giving me a sidelong glance and a smirk that sends a chill down my spine for a reason I can't place. In his moth-eaten cap and messy hair, teeth flashing white in contrast to tan, freckly skin, the first thing that comes to mind when I look at him is an illustration in a copy of _Alice's Adventures in Wonderland_ that I had when I was a kid. The Cheshire Cat. Enigmatic, vaguely dangerous, appearing with a knife-edged smile one moment and gone the next.

"You sure are curious about me, Jean Kirschtein," he hums, and the words feel like a sharp edge traced cautiously across bare skin. "You know what they say about curiosity."

I know exactly what they say about curiosity. In fact, what they say about curiosity mingled with the looks he’s giving me should have me booting him out of the car at thirty miles an hour and vowing to never be a Good Samaritan again. That’s what my instincts are telling me, at any rate, but I’ve never been very good at listening to them. When I was a little kid, Mom had to put the nice candlesticks up beyond my reach because she’d walk into a room and find me running my fingers back and forth through the flames, slower and slower until the warm kiss of a near-escape became the searing flash of a burn. I’d climb on a chair and pull them down when she wasn’t looking. Years later, there are scars where my fingerprints should be, and I still haven’t learned to stop playing with fire.

I swallow hard, steering with my knee and reaching into the breast pocket of my shirt for a cigarette. "I'm not... I... There's just been a lot of folks through here looking for work, is all."

Marco laughs, kicking his feet up on the dashboard and propping his hands behind his head, the most relaxed I've seen him yet. He's got a way of commanding a space, of making you feel like he owns whatever patch of the universe he occupies even if you know he doesn't. That knowing smile stretches lazily across his face the longer he looks at me, and even though I make sure to keep my eyes fixed on the road it still feels like something is crawling around under my skin with warm pricks of energy. "Not interested in work. I'm out seeking my great perhaps."

"Good luck finding it here," I snort, slowing down as we start to roll past dilapidated buildings and thin bodies shuffling along the sides of the road. West Dallas in all its glory. "Nothing here but dust and poor people."

"You're here," he points out, snatching the cigarette from my lips and taking a drag, raising an eyebrow as if daring me to say something about it.

"Yeah, and I'm one of the aforementioned dusty poor people."

Marco snickers, brushing the dust off his shirt. “Oh, ‘aforementioned.’ You sure do talk fancy for a poor boy.”

“I wasn’t always poor.” Shrugging, I decide that it’s probably not best to drag a new acquaintance into that Greek Tragedy of a story. Marco’s got secrets of his own, if his mannerisms and the distant look on his face when he’d mentioned being away from his family are anything to go by. Maybe that mutual distance is something that needs to be maintained. “Although I don’t see what that’s got to do with it.”

“I was always poor. Seven kids on a dried-up patch of land in Telico and you’re bound to wear a few hand-me-downs,” he replies almost conversationally, looking out the window at the bustle of the street as I turn the corner to pull into the back lot of the garage. “You know what, Jean Kirschtein, I like you.”

The truck makes an ungodly death rattle when I turn it off that almost covers the sound of me laughing and asking, “Yeah? Why’s that?”

“Because you realize that poor and stupid ain’t mutually inclusive.” There’s that Cheshire Cat smile again, another little jolt down my spine that feels almost like a warning. I choose to ignore it, grabbing my lunch pail out of the floorboard and slamming the door shut with my hip.

Life is not a fairytale, and characters don’t walk off their pages and into real life. It’s more complex than that, more sinister, and I’d do well to remember that. The fact that the voice of my caution is identical to my father’s should resonate more than it does.

I’m edging closer and closer to a full hour late to work, but something keeps me rooted to the ground, held back from barging through the garage’s back door and listening to Eren get himself worked up even though we get three clients on a good day and we both know he’s keeping me around because he doesn’t want to watch my family starve. I should go to work, do my duty, stop thinking like a child. Life is not a fairytale.

I know that. God, do I know that.

“Hey, Marco.”

“Mm?” He’s almost smoked his way through the entirety of my cigarette, leaning against the front bumper of the truck and quirking his head to the side to acknowledge me.

“How’d you end up on the side of the road this morning?” I mutter.

He just smiles. Smiles like he’s got a whole world full of secrets tucked into his pocket and he knows that I want to find out what they are, and I was never supposed to be Alice, I was supposed to stay on the path I’d carved out for myself and be content with it. It’s taken two years to even get that far. Two years, and one stop for a stranger on the side of the road feels like falling headfirst down the rabbit hole.

“My car broke down,” Marco says, a lilt of almost-laughter to his voice like he’s waiting for me to get the joke.

“And before that?”

His laughter in the car was different, the edges sharper and the sound more commanding. Now it’s a whisper, somehow stronger in its softness, mixing with the dust in the air on a cloud of smoke as he leans forward and perches his elbows on the hood of the truck. Smiling, smiling, never faltering. Still waiting for me to get it. “What if I told you that I’m just a poor farm boy from Telico out looking for some honest work and that I hit a patch of bad luck this morning, and you just happened to save me?”

_‘Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’_

_‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,’ said the Cat._

_‘I don't much care where—’ said Alice._

_‘Then it doesn't matter which way you go,’ said the Cat._

“I’d say that I think you’re lying.” I don’t need a verbal response to know that I’ve hit the nail on the head. Marco’s smile widens around the cigarette into that toothy grin again, something sparking in his eyes, amusement lighting up the darker tones of hazel. I’ve somehow made it to the punchline.

“And what if,” he hums, and if life were a fairytale I might call it an honest-to-God _purr_ , letting the smoldering remnants fall from his fingers to the ground in time with another curious tilt of his head, “I told you that I’m just a poor farm boy from Telico who robbed five stores, broke out of prison, stole a car, and that I hit a patch of bad luck this morning, and you just happened to save me?”

“I’d believe you,” I counter, mirroring his posture and leaning on the other side of the hood of the truck, meeting his gaze evenly. He looks almost surprised, like he’s not used to people having the fortitude to do it. “And I’d tell you to keep your mouth shut about it to everyone else around here, go find your friend, and give me a few days to get your car fixed up.”

“You’d still fix the car.” Not a question. Not a plea. An observation. He shakes his head and huffs out a sharp breath. “Now why would you do that?”

A good question. Why would I? I’d have to be stark raving mad to consider giving him a hand if what he’s just indirectly told me is true.

_‘Oh, you can't help that,’ said the Cat. ‘We're all mad here.’_

“Are you gonna stand there and question my motives, or are you gonna take a lucky break where you can find it?” I finally respond, trying to put a gruff edge on my voice so I don’t sound as vulnerable as I feel. “Moreover, why would you tell me something like that if you weren’t certain I would help you out?”

He laughs again, that same soft, whispered sound, reaches over the car and plucks another cigarette out of my breast pocket. I don’t even have time to offer him a light before he smirks and flashes my half-empty book of matches in his palm - when the hell did he snag those? - and strikes one on his thumbnail, watching it burn for a good while before he even lights the smoke. “You really are somethin’ else, Jean Kirschtein.”

“Yeah, well.” I can’t think of any other response, scuffing my foot back and forth through the dirt and wishing I could remember how to be eloquent. “Guess that’s lucky for you, ain’t it. Now you might wanna clear out. I’ve got a verbal ass-whooping waiting for me in there, and I’ll need to spin some story up about the car. Give me three days.”

“I’ll give you two,” Marco says, wandering around the front bumper. “You know the Springers?”

“You talking about Sasha Springer?” I frown, not sure where he’s headed with that question. “Kinda tall lady, brown hair, real pretty, sorta seems like she could snap you in half if you got her mad enough?”

He nods, rolling the cigarette contemplatively between his fingers. “Bingo. I’ll be there for the next few days. You know. In case you need to keep me posted on the car.”

I should backpedal now. I should smile and nod and go right inside and phone the sheriff. I should do something other than standing here feeling like a fish on a line, an invisible hook tugging at something in the pit of my stomach as I tighten my grip on the handle of my lunch pail and honestly say, “All right. I’ll drop by.”

“Looking forward to it,” Marco replies, walking over to the edge of the back lot and rounding the corner back out to the street.

I swear to God, I can see his smile long after the rest of him is gone.


	3. Marco

Staying in one place for more than a few nights at a time feels strange. The last time I woke up looking at a consistent ceiling over my head, I was still at home, although I can’t quite be sure that the word ever applied to that place after what happened there. Home is just a foreign concept to some people. Maybe that’s bad. Maybe it isn’t.

Give me a steering wheel in one hand and a gun in the other. That’s it. That’s home.

Or at least that’s the closest thing to it I’m ever likely to get.

Instead of _home_ , I get waking up in Connie and Sasha’s living room, staring at the cracked ceiling and listening to them bicker in the kitchen. Some long-gone part of me remembers mornings under a handmade quilt with a rooster screeching outside the window, remembers my brothers jumping on the bed and telling me to get up, remembers what the very last smile my mother ever gave me looked like.

More of me remembers the roof sagging and the bank coming by twice a week, remembers my little sister’s skirt swishing around an alley corner and how it was too late by the time I got home, remembers screaming and pain and Ma’s face looking like she’d never smile again and _our son is dead_ and…

Stop. Breathe. Memories and nightmares of what you can never change are things for people with no future. Then is gone. Now is Connie and Sasha’s living room, the floorboards creaking, the steadily rising voices in the kitchen.

“I mean it, Connie Springer, you are goin’ back!”

“Baby, you don’t know what it’s like in there!”

“I am calling the sheriff as soon as I get this laundry done and you are turning yourself in. A fresh start, you said. Going straight, you said. What do you call this?!”

Breathe. Live for now. Then is remembering how the raw snap of Sasha’s voice sounds a little bit too much like my mother’s. Now is getting up and deciding to go save Connie’s ass the way I’ve been doing since we were kids. Stretching my arms up over my head and yawning, I shuffle into the kitchen, still in the stolen clothes from the farmhouse and looking much worse for wear than I’d like to admit. “Technically, this could be your fresh start. Y’all could pack up your things, take off over the state line. I hear Colorado’s real nice.”

Sasha Springer is pin-up pretty, long chestnut hair and big doe eyes, but she’s absolutely terrifying when she’s angry. Before I even have time to come up with something witty, she’s across the kitchen and swatting my arm with the wooden spoon in one hand while reaching up with the other to grab me by the ear like some sort of misbehaving child. “And _you_. I don’t want to hear a lick of input from you, Marco Bodt. You’re a bad influence. You put him up to this!”

“All due respect, ma’am, but I just busted out of the cell. Connie following me was a choice of his own accord.”

She hits me with the spoon again.

“Connie, you wanna control your woman long enough for me to get breakfast?” I deadpan.

“Control his woman. Control _his_ woman, I oughta--” Sasha raises the spoon again so threateningly that I actually flinch, but Connie wraps an arm around her waist and guides her off to the other side of the kitchen murmuring platitudes about _he don’t mean nothing by it, baby_ and _we’re all a little edgy, it’s the damn heat_ under his breath. It hasn’t struck me until now just how off-balance I am on someone else’s home turf. Hell, I came in here to save Connie’s ass, and he ended up saving mine.

Getting myself some of the leftover oatmeal off the stove is an uncomfortable affair with Sasha glaring at me the whole time, but I’ve gotten used to feeling like there’s a drill going through the back of my head every time we’re in the same room together after three long, agonizing days. Sasha’s lived in West Dallas all her life, managed to rope Connie in three years ago when he came through looking for work, and while the me of my childhood would have insisted that nothing could domesticate Connie Springer, it only takes watching the stupid, dopey looks he gives her all the time to prove me wrong. Dumbass.

He doesn’t detach from her side until I’ve already finished breakfast and gone to wash up, squinting into the gritty shaving mirror bolted to the bathroom wall when he sticks his head through the doorway. “You all right, brother? The missus has a mean spoon hand.”

“Y’know,” I hum thoughtfully, swiping my razor up and down the leather strap next to the mirror a few times to sharpen it before going back to business. “Women are beautiful creatures. They’re pretty, and they have sweet smiles, and they smell nice. Sometimes I wonder why I don’t want anything to do with ‘em. And then your wife opens her mouth, and I remember.”

“Hey!” Connie snaps, taking a swipe at me that I manage to dodge while still shaving. “That’s my girl you’re talking about. Watch it.”

“Wouldn’t be nobody hitting anybody with no goddamned spoon in a house full of men,” I grumble, rinsing the razor off one last time and reaching for a towel to wipe the leftover stripes of foam off my jawline.

“And if this was a house full of men you’d be way too happy,” he snorts, throwing a bundle of fabric at me. Fresh clothes. “Sasha said to tell you to change. You look like a hobo.”

“Yeah, ‘cause I’ll fit in your clothes. You caught yourself a real smart one, Con.”

“Don’t be a jerk.” This time he actually does land a hit on me, a sharp jab to the side that sends a flash of pain across my torso. “They’re leftovers from her laundry business, clothes people never came to pick up.”

Nothing fancy - brown pants, an off-white shirt, new pair of suspenders - but they’re in far better condition and of a more suitable size than what I’ve got on. Defeated by my own vanity, I sigh and shove Connie back out into the hallway. “Fine. Tell her I said thank you.”

I keep the stolen newsboy cap, though. I like the looks of it, and it’s a souvenir of one hell of an adventure.

Sasha is outside putting the wares of her laundry business on the line when I get out of the bathroom, and by the time she walks back in I’m sitting at the kitchen table rolling my cigarettes for the day and trying to look like I’m staying out of trouble for fear that she still has that spoon with her.

“You look better,” she says tersely, clutching a pile of folded sheets to her chest with detergent-cracked hands. “Not so much like a lawless delinquent.”

“I assure you, Mrs. Springer, I’m still a lawless delinquent,” I tell her in a flat voice, tapping my last cigarette on the table and slipping it into my breast pocket. “Just a better-dressed one, for which I’m thankful to you.”

“You’re welcome,” she snaps like she’d rather be saying _go take a long walk off a short pier_ , flouncing off into the living room with her laundry and a haughty little sniff.

“Where’s Connie?” I ask, following her out of the kitchen and jamming my hands in my pockets. God knows I’ve got nothing better to do than sit around and play innumerable hands of poker with him until sundown.

“He’s out in the back helping hang things up.” The implication that I should be doing the same sits so heavy on her voice that I’m almost shocked at the lack of subtlety.

“Nice of him,” I nod, tipping my hat in her direction and heading for the front door. “If y’all need me, I’ll be out running a few errands.”

“Are you - well, it’s pointless to ask if you’re crazy, but _really?_ ” Sasha slams her armful of laundry down with pursed lips, glowering at me. “You’re on the run from the law and you’re just gonna waltz around West Dallas like you own the place.”

“That’s the plan,” I shrug, opening the door and turning around to shoot her a little smirk before I hop off the porch. “Besides, I got nothing to worry about. I ain’t famous enough for my own wanted posters. Yet.”

It’s hot for morning, the late July sunshine beating down combining with the dust hanging in the air to make everything feel heated and prickly, an uncomfortable tickle in the back of my throat from inhaling the grit and the dirt. But despite that, I breathe a little easier.

After three days, that house had become another prison. I feel like I just busted out all over again.

West Dallas is busy, loud and dusty and undeniably poverty-stricken, people crossing the street with slumped shoulders and worn clothes. The same principles I was raised on apply even in the city, apparently. Sun up. Time to go to work. Work until you physically can’t, and then keep going. Sweat and bleed and be grateful for what little you get out of it.

Pa never did understand the concept of working smarter instead of harder.

For every open door I pass, there are three boarded up storefronts signaling who knows how many families without a source of income. I could count the places that are actually doing business on one hand. A dilapidated five-and-dime with the porch sinking dangerously. A diner with dust so thick on the windows that the people inside just look like vague blurs. A grocery store with nothing on the shelves but a meager selection of canned food. The only place that seems to actually be thriving is a pawnshop on the corner, a long line of hollow faces and desperate eyes winding out the door. Fathers coming with heirloom pocket watches in hand to cover a little of last month’s rent. Mothers bearing wedding rings so their children can go to bed without crying from hunger pains. All those tender little sentiments in life have a way of not meaning as much when your belly’s gnawing on your backbone.

Anyone else might be disgusted that someone’s making a profit off the misfortunes of others, but I have a little too much in common with the jolly-looking pawnbroker behind the counter to cast the first stone. I’ve done my share of shady profiting, and I’d sooner be a thief than a hypocrite.

The garage where Jean Kirschtein and I parted ways three days ago is a little farther up the road, the front desk abandoned and not a single person in sight. I almost keep walking, not noticing until I’m around the corner that the back door is open and staticky strains of swing music are floating out into the dusty air. I’d told Sasha that I was running errands. The least I could do is go check on the car.

There’s a beat-up old radio sitting on a workbench next to the door, the crackly, distorted music covering up the sound of the grit under my shoes when I edge inside. Three cars in a building that could probably hold ten, two trucks and the stolen model T pulled in the far corner. The only movement in the place comes from a pair of feet sticking out from underneath one of the trucks, tapping against the floor in time to the music. I’ve seen the shoes before, and the voice humming along with the melody line is familiar. Before I realize it, a little snort of a laugh rattles in my throat.

Jean’s toes stop tapping, a metallic clunk rising through the air as he goes to slide himself out from under the vehicle. “Eren? You back already?”

I plant my foot against the edge of the rickety old glider he’s lying on before the top half of his body can roll out, smirking and drumming my fingertips on the top of the truck’s rusted-out tailgate. “Nope. You got two more guesses.”

“Marco,” he responds almost immediately, and there’s a measure of satisfaction at how quickly he said it that I don’t even try to deny. Biting back a victorious grin, I plant my foot on the glider and roll him the rest of the way out. Same messy hair and tawny eyes I remember from three days ago, same blue work shirt with his name on a patch, sleeves rolled up haphazardly. The only difference between then and now is that Jean’s obviously been up to his elbows in motor oil for hours, smears of black all over his hands and up his arms and one stray little smudge along his cheekbone.

I blink a few times, swallow hard. Jesus. Don’t know how much you’ve missed the game until you’ve been on the sidelines for three months.

“Good guess,” I grin slyly down at him, leaning against the truck and waiting for him to get to his feet. “Been expecting me?”

“Well, I… you kinda… yeah, actually,” Jean shrugs, wiping his hands on a grease-spotted towel hanging from his belt before raking fingers through his already mussed hair. “Since, y’know. I was supposed to see you about the car.”

“You were supposed to see me about the car,” I nod, popping the tailgate on the truck and hopping up unceremoniously to sit on it. “I was downright dejected, sittin’ there at the Springers waiting for you. Nothing to do but win sixty-three hands of poker and listen to Sasha yell at me about how I need to find Jesus and stop leading her husband down the slippery slope to damnation.”

He barks out a laugh, jumps up on the tailgate beside me and leans against the other side. “Sounds like you got your hands full enough without me interfering, anyway.”

“Hell, I’d pay you to interfere.”

“Sounds like a better job than fixin’ half-dead cars for ten hours a day. I’ll take it.”

“Too late now. I’m already here,” I point out, nodding over at the Model T. “So what’s the diagnosis?”

Jean grimaces, jumps back down to the floor and walks over to the car, from which he’s very wisely removed the license plate. “Unfortunately, expensive. I don’t know how hard you rode this thing, but the transmission is all kinds of screwed up. Gonna have to completely replace that, put in a new spark plug, and fix the exhaust valve before it’s even somewhat fit to drive. The fact that I can fix it at all’s the good news.”

“And the bad news?”

“Well, I, uh…” Sucking in a breath through his teeth, he leans back against the side of the car and looks over at me with a nervous tension pulling tight at his shoulders. “It’ll be a while before I can even touch it. I need parts for the repair, and we gotta wait for those to come in from Galveston.”

“Galveston?!” I’m sitting up ramrod-straight in a second flat, jaw dropping.

“Yeah. So at least two weeks on that.”

“The hell kind of auto shop has to ship in Model T parts from _Galveston?!_ ”

“We mostly work on trucks,” Jean counters almost defensively, crossing his arms over his chest. “Production’s down ‘cause of the economy, not as many parts to be had. Other shops in town ain’t gonna give us anything they got. Nearest supplier’s in Galveston. Don’t like it, go steal another car.”

I grumble something about where the economy can shove its effect on the auto industry, standing up and reaching into my pocket for a smoke.

“Why don’t you, though?” Jean asks, tilting his head to the side. “Steal another car, I mean.”

Even despite my newfound foul mood, I have to laugh. “You’re a piece of work, y’know that? Most people’d call the police, and you’re here tellin’ me to just go steal another car.”

He just looks at me for a moment, lips pressing into a thin line, contemplative. “I don’t even really know you. I can’t judge you. I don’t even know what all you did to wind up in prison in the first place.”

I sidle over to him with the unlit cigarette dangling from my lips, a grin curling around the little cylinder and spreading ear to ear. “Oh, you know. A little armed robbery, a little auto theft, some breaking and entering. I’m a busy man.”

Jean nods. “So why’d you do it?”

I open my mouth to answer him, but stop just short of formulating the words when I realize that no one’s ever asked me that question before. Most people aren’t all that interested in why I make a habit of robbing folks beyond whatever it takes to get me behind bars. All those months ago, the botched robbery and the handcuffs and the long drive to the courthouse, the days staring at the wall of a cell, and no one ever bothered to ask me why. But Jean, he wants to know. He’s standing there watching me like I’m some sort of puzzle with mismatched pieces, the gears in his head turning as he tries to figure me out, and I would have never thought that the word _why_ could feel so liberating.

“You know who Billy the Kid was?” I ask him, lighting the cigarette and stomping the match out under my shoe.

“‘Course I know who Billy the Kid was, I didn’t grow up under a rock,” he snorts, tilting his head to the side. “He was an outlaw. Fastest gun in the Old West.”

Smirking, I nod and exhale a thin stream of smoke. “Uh-huh. And you know who Pat Garrett was?”

“Can’t say I do,” Jean frowns, looking confused.

“He was the man who shot Billy the Kid,” I tell him, taking a step closer, feeling out the new territory. If anything, he leans into it, hanging on every word. “Killed the greatest outlaw who ever lived, and no one knows his name. That’s why I did it, nothing more, nothing less. Heroes never make the history books, Jean Kirschtein, and I certainly aim to.”

He nods slowly after a minute, seeming to finally realize how close we are and taking a step back, turning around to frown at the defeated Model T. “And all of this is stopping you from stealing another car why?”

“Because I’m a fugitive, kid,” I laugh, leaning on the front bumper. He’s maintaining distance now, but that one moment where we drifted a little too close is all the indication I need. “Can’t just steal another car because I don’t wanna leave the law a trail to follow. They don’t know if I’m in Dallas or Galveston or Timbuk-goddamn-tu, and keeping it that way makes it a hell of a lot easier to get out of here.”

Jean walks over to the radio and starts fiddling with it, turning knobs until the music sounds a little less scratchy. With a melancholy little quirk of his lips, he looks down at the table and says, “I don’t know anyone who ever got out of West Dallas.”

“Well, you know me. I got plans.”

“Everybody’s got plans,” he laughs, a bitter tinge to his voice that wasn’t there before.

“No, everybody’s got _dreams_.” Pushing myself off the car, I cross over in front of him and sit on top of the workbench, skirting the edge of his personal space again as I smirk and flick the ash off the end of the cigarette. “I got _plans_.”

Jean rolls his eyes and tries to reach around me to get to the radio again. “Yeah? And what’re your _plans?_ ”

“Nobody’ll be lookin’ for me up around Ohio, Chicago, New York,” I hum, counting off the places on my fingers. “And the real big players are up there. Capone, Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson. I run with them, I can make a name for myself. Just you wait. In ten years, you can tell all your friends that you met Marco Bodt back when he was small time and robbing gas stations for page-two write-ups.”

I half-expect him to laugh at me. God knows Connie’s done it enough for that to be considered the default reaction. But instead he just mutters, “I always wanted to see New York.”

“That one of your dreams?” I grin, sliding off the edge of the workbench and nodding at our surroundings. “You know, the things you won’t do ‘cause you’re too busy sittin’ around here fixing up people’s trucks and listening to godawful music?”

“It ain’t godawful, it’s swing,” Jean huffs, grabbing a wrench off the workbench and stalking back over to the truck he’d been working on when I came in. “And it don’t matter. This is my life; this is what I get.”

“Aw, come on, don’t be like that.” Laughing, I follow him across the garage, leaning over the other side of the truck’s hood. “If you could do anything, money ain’t an issue, obligations ain’t an issue, what would you do?”

“Why does it matter--”

“Spit it out.”

“It’s stupid.”

“Jean.”

He flushes bright red, popping the hood up and jamming his arm down next to the engine. “Fine. Y’know how I told you I wasn’t always poor, right? My family used to own this big department store downtown. We lost everything in the stock market crash, and then Dad died, and… well. Anyway, when I was younger I went to this private school in Dallas. Real nice, tuition was more than most people make in a year. We had a school band, and I started playing the trumpet when I was about eight. I was good at it. And I…” If it’s even possible, his face goes even darker. Like he’s compensating for his lack of composure, he grunts and rattles something around in the engine. “When I was a kid I always used to think that one day I was gonna go to New York and play in a big band. Y’know, with Benny Goodman or someone. Like I said, it’s stupid.”

Grumbling under his breath, he goes back to working on the car, not seeming to care that I’m still standing there watching him. The funny thing is that I can see him in some fancy school uniform with a big, dopey smile, toting a shiny new trumpet everywhere he went. Jean’s fatalistic and grumpy, sure, but I saw a glimpse of that other person when he was with his mother and his little sister. He was happy once.

I wonder what that’s like.

“You could do it, you know,” I finally say.

“No I can’t.” He shakes his head sharply, yanking a burnt out spark plug out of the engine and scratching at his nose, leaving a little smudge of motor oil there. “I got Mom and Ninette. I’m the only source of income they have, Marco, okay? My mother’s never worked a day in her life. If I wasn’t here, they’d end up in one of those awful camps out by the railroad tracks; my sister’d be begging for scraps. I can’t let that happen, and even if I could…”

“Ah, the ‘and even if I could,’ which translates to ‘I secretly want to,’” I shoot back, still not willing to back down.

“And even if I could, I pawned my trumpet three months ago to pay the rent, okay?! Christ, just drop it!”

And he sounds so raw, so hurt, that I actually do. I think back to the line of people outside the pawn shop down the street, people trading all of life’s tender little sentiments for the chance to put food on the table. Jean slapped a pawn ticket on his dream, and something about that is so goddamn sad that for a moment, I almost want to say I’m sorry for bringing it up. But then I remember that I never did know how to apologize, and I just nod slowly instead, dropping the smoldering remnants of my cigarette to the ground and sighing.

“You ever think of holding a up a few gas stations for rent money?” I ask after a long pause.

Jean throws his head back and _howls_ with laughter, holding onto the front of the truck for support. “Me? Me. Robbing people. Can you honestly see me trying to hold up a store?”

“I think if you set your mind to it, you could do it,” I tell him, shrugging and trying very steadfastly to push the image of Jean with a .45 in his hand smirking at some poor shmuck of a bank teller out of my head.

“Think I’ll stick to fixin’ cars, thanks,” he shakes his head, still chuckling as he leans back down into the engine and rifles around a little more. “Speaking of which, I can’t even touch that Model T until your services are paid in full. My boss has a rule about that.”

“Well then it might be longer than two weeks on those repairs, because I’m flat broke,” I huff, already cursing my luck under my breath. Maybe stealing another car would be easier. Not like I haven’t done it before.

“Or you could just pay off the repairs by helping around the shop for a few weeks until the parts get here.”

I raise an eyebrow at him, frowning a bit. “You got the kind of authority around here to make that kind of deal?”

“My boss has been my best friend since I was six, so if he complains I can always sock him in the jaw,” he shrugs, looking up and smirking at me. He’s got a dimple right above the corner of his mouth that cuts a little line through the smear of motor oil on his cheek when he smiles, and I’ll be damned if it’s not the most endearing thing I’ve ever seen. “You know anything about cars?”

“Enough,” I grin, looking over at the useless hull of the Model T and seeing more possibility in it than I ever would have thought possible.

“Good,” Jean says, slamming the hood of the truck shut and patting my shoulder as he walks past me, leaving a blackened handprint on my shirt. Sasha’s going to be livid. I can’t even describe how little I care. “You can start right now. Go get me that socket wrench. I gotta have both of these old rust buckets ready to roll by four.”

 


	4. Jean

A week passes like an hour, and I suppose that's the difference a little company makes.

I'm used to having the garage to myself. Eren has a habit of being a lazy bastard and saying he's got paperwork to do when he's actually taking a nap at the front desk, and when he's not doing that he's banging around my workspace and tap dancing on my last nerve. That usually lasts a few minutes before I throw something at him and he clears out; so for the most part it's me, the radio, and long hours trying to bring dead vehicles back to life. A little frustrating, a little lonely, but it pays the bills.

It's different with Marco around. He knows his way around cars, helps me get my usual workload done twice as fast, and the place doesn't feel quite as dead with him whistling underneath the cars and telling awful jokes. Watching him, it's easy to forget the circumstances that brought him here. No one would ever expect a wanted man to be so... _nice_ , for lack of a better word. The impeccable manners and easy smiles he’d shown Mom and Ninette on that first day I met him seem to be a universal principle. Two days after starting work at the garage, he’d even charmed cranky old Mrs. Brzenska at the diner across the street to the point of her bringing us free food, an entire meal and a slice of apple pie each won on nothing but smiles and “yes, ma’am”s. I couldn’t tell if it was some sort of witchcraft or just plain old skill.

Every customer he’s dealt with since he’s been here does nothing but sing the new guy’s praises to Eren, who seems to be the one person in the entirety of West Dallas who doesn’t think Marco Bodt is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Of course, Eren’s pretty angry with the world in general, has been since we were kids, but the mood he’s been in for the past week is a rare level of surly, probably something to do with the fact that I went behind his back in a manner that resulted in him not getting money.

I’m elbow-deep in the engine of a Dodge truck with starting problems while Eren’s up in the front room dealing with customers, a middle-aged man in a flannel shirt and his wife who’s actively gushing that “The new young man you’ve got working out there is a doll, Eren, I hope you keep him around.”

“Oh yeah, he’s a real peach, ain’t he.” Eren grumbles, green eyes glaring daggers through the open door at us when Marco snickers as he hands me a wrench. “In fact, Jean hired him. I was never even consulted. I’m just so happy that my employees take initiative.”

“Hey, Marco, is it just me or d’you got a funny taste in your mouth too?” I ask as soon as the bell in the front room chimes, signaling the customers’ departure.

“Yeah, yeah, I do,” he nods, sitting down on a glider slid halfway underneath a rusty Chrysler coupe and shooting Eren the brightest of smiles. “Tastes kinda bitter.”

“Laugh it up, you two,” Eren snaps, slamming the receipt book shut and raking a hand through messy, dark hair. “‘Cause I think it’s real funny that we’re already in the red and you had to go playin’ charity and making promises you got no right to make, Jean. A goddamn riot.”

“It’s one missed sale. You seen how much faster our turnover rate is?” I shrug, waving my wrench around at the cars parked in the garage. “You’re paying my usual wages and doing twice the business. Marco’s more than paying for himself. F’you could stop being a Scrooge for ten seconds you might realize that this ain’t too bad of a deal.”

“Yeah, sure.” Grumbling, Eren grabs his hat off the front desk and jams it angrily down onto his head, snatching up the receipt book and storming out into the garage. “God bless us, every fuckin’ one. I’m headed down a couple blocks to talk to Mr. Fischer about financing the repairs on that truck. Stay busy, don’t screw around, and I swear to God I’ll pop you in the jaw if I come back and you’re blastin’ that damn radio again.”

“Yessir,” Marco nods, smiling serenely. Eren stalks out through the open garage door, and Marco waits five seconds, ten seconds, fifteen before chucking his wrench down on the concrete and walking over to flip the radio on with a smirk. “Smoke break?”

“I’ll do you one better.” Shooting him a grin, I slam the hood of the truck down and slip through the doorway into the front room. Under the desk is an old lunch pail filled with half-melted ice, four bottles of Budweiser bobbing up and down in the water. Watching out the window to make sure no one’s looking, I grab two of them, kicking the door shut behind me as I walk back into the garage and hand one to Marco. “Eren says he can’t do paperwork without drinking or he’s liable to punch a wall. There’s usually something up front if you know where to look.”

Marco snorts out a laugh, knocking the bottle cap off against the edge of the workbench and raising his drink slightly in my direction. “To Eren Jaeger, then. For his good taste in business practices that almost makes up for his shitty taste in beer.”

“I’ll drink to that.” I’m a little too afraid to break my bottle and look like an idiot trying to open it the way Marco did his, so I twist it off with the hem of my shirt over the cap before clinking it against his and taking a sip.

“Somethin’ tells me that after working with that guy every day, you’d drink to just about anything.”

“Nah, he’s a good guy.”

“Eren’s a good guy and you got no issues helping a fugitive flee North. You sure got an interesting moral compass.”

“I got no issues helping a fugitive flee North as long as he works to pay for his stolen car,” I shrug, digging a cigarette out of my pocket and lighting it before continuing. “And the fact that Eren’s a cranky, tight-fisted sonuvabitch don’t mean that he ain’t a good person.”

He rolls his eyes a bit, hops up to sit on the cluttered surface of the workbench. “Whatever you say, compadre.”

“Look.” I don’t know what it is about that one word, but there must be enough gravity in my voice for Marco to take me seriously, the smile fading from his lips when I breathe out a sigh and hop up to sit next to him, setting my beer off to the side and rolling the cigarette between my fingers. “My old man offed himself, okay? The family business went down like the fuckin’ Titanic and he gambled away the savings we had left trying to get it back and the day after I turned sixteen he put a Colt revolver in his mouth and pulled the trigger.”

Marco just stares at me for a few seconds, blinking slowly. “Jesus.”

It feels like a ball of lead just dropped straight into the hollow of my chest, memories tugging me back to Mom screaming, Nettie confused and crying, Police officers everywhere. And me. Just me. Me in the corner feeling like the world had imploded around me, not even enough space for grief under the weight of the fact that I was now the only thing standing between us and an even worse disaster. Two years later, and I still feel like I’m trying to claw my way out of the wreckage. Slow progress is still progress.

“Anyway, the day after the funeral, Eren showed up and offered me a job. His dad’s a doctor in town. Remember my fancy private school? Eren and I went there together; he was a couple years ahead of me. But he wasn’t exactly the doctoring type, so after graduation his dad floated him the money to get the garage started. Business here’s usually so slow that he didn’t really need the help, but he hired me anyway. He’s a pain in the ass, but he’s the only reason I can feed my mom and my sister, so yeah, in my opinion he’s a good guy.”

A long stretch of silence. Eventually, Marco nods stiffly, taking a long drink before setting his bottle down on top of a rusty toolbox and shoots me a sidelong glance. “No offense, but your old man sounds like a piece of shit.”

“None taken,” I shrug, taking one last drag off my smoke before hopping down from the workbench and grinding it out under my foot. “Not gonna disagree with you. What about you? Gotta be a reason you’ve been hell and gone from Telico for four years.”

There’s a flash of something across his face, but it’s gone before I can see exactly what it is, replaced with a little quirk of a smile and a shake of his head. “Nah. My folks are good God-fearing people who’re grateful for their simple lives.”

“So why’d you take off, then?”

“I wasn’t grateful for my simple life,” he replies, and there’s just the slightest flash in his eyes that warns me to leave it there.

And I do, because the bell in the front room chooses that exact second to ring.

 _“Shit,”_ I hiss, grabbing both the beer bottles and shoving them under the workbench while Marco reaches over much more calmly to turn the radio off.

“You that scared of Eren?” he asks.

“Whoever’s up there ain’t Eren.” Shaking my head and grabbing for a wrench so I look busy. “Eren would’ve come back through the garage. It’s either a customer or Mom coming to drop something off. Either way it won’t look good if we’re back here messin’ around. I’ll go see who it is; you… fix something.”

He just sighs, grabbing the toolbox and going back to the car he’d been working on when Eren left. Cursing under my breath, I rake a hand through my hair and nudge open the door to the front room, expecting to see my mother with something I forgot back at the house but met instead with a taller, younger woman in a starched nurse’s uniform, black hair pinned back neatly beneath her little white cap and dark, almond-shaped eyes glazing boredly over her surroundings.

“Mikasa. You should’ve come in through the garage. I ‘bout had a heart attack,” I laugh nervously, a big, dopey smile stretching lazily across my face.

“Eren fusses when I don’t use the front door,” she shrugs, holding up a little cloth-wrapped bundle as a response. “Besides, he left his change of clothes at home. I just came to drop them off. We’ve got a benefit dinner after y’all close up tonight.”

“So he’s gotta dress up tonight. That explains why he’s in such a foul mood,” I snort, leaning against the counter. “He just stepped out to go see a customer about payment issues, but you can bring that on back and put it in his locker for him.”

She just hums her assent and follows me back into the garage, sidestepping the puddles of oil and dirt to save her white shoes from disaster. Marco re-emerges from beneath the Chrysler with a rattle, tilting his head to the side. “Not your mom, then?”

Mikasa fixes him with an even, analytical look, which is about as close to a warm first greeting as it’s possible to get from her. “You’re the new guy.”

“Yup,” he nods, beaming up at her like the scrutiny just rolls off his back. “Marco Bodt. Nice to meet you.”

“Mikasa Ackerman.” It’s hard to tell if you haven’t known her for as long as I have, but she softens a bit, the corner of her mouth giving the barest upward twitch. She skirts around the front of the car and goes over to the rusty lockers in the corner, shoving the bundle of clothes into Eren’s before looking over her shoulder at me. “I’d stay, but I’m on break. I need to get back to the hospital so I can get off at five to get ready.”

“You could always ditch that benefit-whatever and let me take you out for dinner instead,” I blurt out before I can stop myself, dissolving into that dopey grin again while simultaneously wishing I could sink into the ground beneath me.

“Maybe some other time,” she says, a little almost-laugh coloring her voice as she shuts Eren’s locker and turns around. “I promised I’d be there. Besides, Ninette’s birthday is next week, isn’t it? You should buy her a present instead.”

I know she doesn’t mean it like that, but the insinuation that I couldn’t afford to buy my little sister a birthday present _and_ take Mikasa out on a date stings, mostly because it’s true. I mumble out something along the lines of _yeah, you’re right,_ face red and hands shaking slightly as I head back to the workbench to pick up my tools again. She’s right. Of course she is. The days where I wore a shirt twice before I outgrew it and threw away more food than I ate are long gone. Now it’s working overtime for the mere possibility of getting Nettie a doll that isn’t falling apart for her birthday. It’s not the time to be thinking of anything else.

Marco seems to pick up on the discomfort left hanging in the air, slides his glider the rest of the way out from under the car and grabs the bumper to haul himself up. “So I’m guessin’ you know Jean’s family, right - agh, _dammit!_ ”

The rest of his question gets cut off by a pained groan as soon as he stands up, a hand pressed to his abdomen and his face knotted up in discomfort. He sways a little on his feet, darts out a hand to steady himself, and the action shows the red stain blooming outwards across the fabric of his shirt.

“Oh God, are you all right?” I rush out, running over and throwing his arm over my shoulder before he can lose his balance again. Despite how shaky Marco is on his feet, he feels solid, strongly-built and enough heavier than me that it’s a little hard to keep him from falling over.

“M’fine,” he mutters. He looks like he’s about to pass out, hazel eyes glassy and a sheen of sweat clinging to his skin despite the fact that it’s not all that hot in the shade of the garage.

“Get him into the front room. I’ve got some things in the car.” Her shift at the hospital apparently forgotten, Mikasa goes rushing out into the lobby, the bell on the front door jingling in her wake.

Marco manages to move of his own accord across the garage and through the door, using me more for balance than anything else, but his normally tanned skin is pale as a sheet by the time he collapses into one of the chairs in the front room, freckles sticking out in sharp contrast. Breathing shallowly, another flash of pain skates across his face when he looks down at the mess his shirt’s become. “Every time I think the damn thing’s healed up…”

He doesn’t have time to finish that thought, trailing off as Mikasa comes walking briskly back through the door with a massive first aid kit in tow, nurse mode fully engaged as she all but shoves me out of the way. I’ve seen her work, know how she gets, and I know she’s what Marco needs far more than me right now.

Last year Ninette was climbing the dead tree in our back yard, fell off the top branch and broke her arm along with bruising herself blue all over and knocking her head hard enough on the ground that she saw double. We didn’t even bother taking her to the hospital, just drove her over to the Jaeger’s, partly because we knew she’d get better care there and partly because we couldn’t afford to pay for a documented doctor’s visit. Mikasa was the one who set her arm and made sure the concussion wasn’t too bad. She does this thing where it seems like the world outside her and her patient doesn’t even exist, like everything else is an afterthought and more than likely in the way.

That’s how she is with Marco now, kneeling down in front of his chair and pressing the back of her hand to his forehead. “Burning up. Jean.”

“Huh?” I jump a little, not thinking that she’d acknowledge someone outside her zone of focus.

“I know Eren’s got that damned beer bucket behind the counter. Bring me the ice.” The other two beer bottles roll off somewhere after I yank them out, but I don’t take the time to notice where they went, watching as Mikasa pulls a handkerchief out of her purse and ties a handful of ice up in it before pressing it against the side of Marco’s neck. “All right, shirt off and tell me what I’m dealing with.”

“Buy me dinner first, dollface,” he sputters out a thin little laugh before wincing again and reaching up to pop the first few buttons of his shirt. “Got cut a little over a week ago. It’s just taking a while to heal up. I’ll be fine.”

Mikasa and I both suck in a breath through our teeth when he finally gets the shirt off, revealing a long, ragged cut down his midsection that’s bleeding too much and looks far too inflamed to be over a week old. Mikasa’s seen worse, but ever since I watched people scrubbing blood out of the floorboards of Dad’s study I’ve never had the stomach for this sort of thing, eyes settling on the dip of Marco’s collarbone so I don’t have to look at the mess beneath, counting the freckles there and trying to swallow the metallic taste in my mouth. “Christ on a crutch.”

“You two gonna stand there eyein’ me up, or are we gonna patch this thing?”

“It’s infected,” Mikasa frowns, digging around in the first aid kit until she comes up with a bottle of iodine. “That’s why it’s not healing as fast as it should and why you’ve got that fever. You're lucky we caught it; at this rate it probably would’ve necrotized and you’d be in way deeper trouble than you are now. How did this even happen?”

Marco locks eyes with me over her shoulder, his voice perfectly even as he says, “I had a little accident mending a fence.”

Yeah. Yeah, that’s probably a better thing to tell her than ‘I got injured busting out of jail.’

“Well, at any rate, we’ve got to clean this before it gets worse,” she huffs, popping the top off the iodine bottle and flicking her gaze upwards to look at him. “How high is your pain tolerance?”

“Higher than you’d expect. Why?”

“Because this is gonna hurt,” she shrugs, pouring a stream of the brown liquid directly onto the wound.

Marco manages to utter every single profanity I’ve heard in my life and a few I haven’t in the space of about two seconds, his voice colliding with the backs of his clenched teeth and fists clenching in his lap. Mikasa doesn’t even blink, dousing a wad of gauze in the stuff and blotting around the edges of the cut. The tidal wave of cursing fades into one long, pained hiss, Marco’s eyes screwing shut as he stomps one foot repeatedly on the dusty floorboards.

“Almost done,” she says, something soothing in the temperate lull of her voice while she finishes cleaning out the wound and pulls out a long roll of bandages, winding them around his waist in measured, practiced motions.

In response, Marco lets out a half-manic little cackle of a laugh, letting his head fall back and staring up at the ceiling. “Stings a little.”

Looking at the whole scene still makes me feel queasy, so I swallow hard and duck around behind the chair, reaching for one of the discarded beer bottles that’s rolled out into the lobby. I’m just starting to stand up when I actually get a closer look at Marco’s back, the spray of freckles across broad shoulders not nearly as noticeable as the thick, jagged lines of raised white scar tissue cutting across from the nape of his neck all the way down to the waistline of his pants. It looks like some sort of wild animal mauled him. I think back to him telling Mikasa that he had a high pain tolerance and grimace.

“What in the hell happened to your back?” I ask, crossing back in front of the chair as soon as Mikasa’s done bandaging him up.

If possible after the whole fiasco with getting the cut patched up, Marco’s face goes even paler. But it’s not pain I see skating across the planes of his face, not anymore. It’s echoes of something, memories, and for once I don’t even see a trace of his smirks and quick wit and smooth talk. There’s only one thing in his eyes, resonating so deep that I can almost feel it secondhand.

Fear.

“Oh, that,” he says too softly, trying for a smile but failing halfway. “I, uh… I got caught under a tractor.”

It’s the same look he gave Mikasa when he said he’d been fixing a fence.

“I’ve heard horror stories about things like that,” Mikasa nods, packing up her kit and handing Marco his shirt back. “You see people come into the hospital who’ve had a real number done on ‘em by farm equipment. Dangerous stuff.”

“Yeah,” he mutters, voice hollow and eyes seeming to be staring at something else even though he’s looking right at me. “I should probably be dead, tell you the truth.”

“Good thing you’re not, or Jean would have to deal with Eren on his own,” she says with a little smile, headed for the door. “All right, I’ve really got to go. Marco, you keep that clean and change the bandages once a day. No work until it’s healed up. Take a few days and rest, all right?”

“Yes, ma’am. Much obliged.” The smile comes to him this time, only faltering once Mikasa’s out the door and he slumps back against the counter with a shaky breath. “Probably shouldn’t’ve cussed so much in front of a lady, but goddamn that hurt.”

“She’s Eren’s sister. She hears worse than that over the dinner table,” I laugh, stashing the ice bucket back behind the counter and handing him one of the two remaining beers, which he drains half of in one gulp. “Sorry we don’t have anything stronger. Got whiskey at home, but a lot of good that does now.”

“Sister?” he frowns, wiping his mouth on the back of his arm and giving me a disbelieving look. “But she’s Asian, ain’t she?”

“Adopted sister, and she’s half-Japanese, yeah. Her mother came over in 1912, married her dad and had Mikasa a couple years later. Her old man was pals with Dr. Jaeger, so when they both died in a car crash, I think it was… thirteen years ago? Anyway, the Jaegers took her in.”

“Huh,” he nods, slipping his shirt on with a wince but leaving it unbuttoned while he finishes his drink and watches me with an oddly analytical stare over the top of the bottle. “So is she your girl, or what?”

“I… what… she… God, no!” I sputter, grabbing the last beer for myself and musing that Eren can shove his complaining where the sun don’t shine as I flush beet red and twist off the cap. “I mean, we’ve gone out around town a few times, but it ain’t like we’re going steady or nothing. Eren’d kill me, and I can’t exactly afford a girl right now, y’know. I mean, I _wish_ , but… yeah.”

“Uh-huh,” Marco says, nodding slowly.

“Yeah,” I mutter, feeling ten kinds of awkward as I start organising the papers on the front counter so I have something to do with my hands. The lobby gets very quiet for a few minutes, but I can still feel Marco watching me as I finish tidying up.

“You slept with her yet?” he asks suddenly.

“Jesus Christ, Marco!” I all but squeak, dropping a stack of folders.

“That’s a no, then. You ever kiss her?”

“What the hell, man?!”

“Another no,” he smirks, buttoning up his shirt and rolling his shoulders. “You ever kiss anyone?”

I lean down and pick up the folders, feeling like my face is about to melt off.

“Sweet sacks of shit, you _haven’t_ ,” he throws his head back and laughs.

“Shut up!”

“That’s so _fuckin’_ adorable, Jean, Christ.”

“I’ll come over there and ‘adorable’ you here in a second,” I grumble, tossing my armload of papers back onto the counter and glaring at him. “Over there actin’ all high and mighty. You ever slept with a girl, then?”

“No, I have never in my life slept with a girl,” he says with an impish grin, leaning over the counter.

“Ever kissed a girl?”

“No I have not.”

“Then why the _hell_ ,” I hiss, leaning over the counter as well and whapping him upside the back of the head, “are you laughin’ at me?!”

If anything, he only smiles wider. “No reason, I guess. Blame it on the pain. Makes me giddy.”

“You’re really damn strange, you know that?” I frown, not even noticing how close our proximity to each other was until I’m walking back into the garage.

“You have no idea,” Marco says airily behind me, stopping in the doorway when he sees me yanking my stuff out of my locker. “Going somewhere?”

“Yeah, taking you back to the Springers. Mikasa said you had to rest, remember?”

“God Almighty, a convalescence in the Springer household,” he groans, scrubbing a hand down the side of his face. “I don’t know that I trust Sasha anywhere near an open wound. She’ll pour arsenic on it instead of iodine and claim it was an accident.”

“Well you could always stay with me,” I reply before I even know what I’m saying, stopping short and staring at the pattern of rust on the front of my locker door.

Marco flashes the brightest grin I’ve ever seen on him and says, “I wouldn’t want to impose.”

“You said you’re sleepin’ on the couch at the Springers’, right? That’s nowhere to rest up if you’re trying to heal,” I rush out, not sure why I have to justify the offer, legitimize it in some way, _really_ not sure why my cheeks feel hot again. “So come home with me. You can kip in my room for a couple days and I’ll take the couch.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he all but drawls out, and it strikes me that this is some sort of game to him, seeing just how hard I’m willing to work to make this happen. It strikes me some time after that I’m not exactly sure why I’m working to make this happen at all.

“My mom’s a great cook,” I offer.

“Sold.” Marco claps his hands and rubs them together with a victorious little smirk, walking over and leaning on me with a dramatic swooning motion. “Take me to my sickbed, Jean Kirschtein, I do believe I feel faint.”

“Get off me, you goon,” I scoff, landing a solid shove on his shoulderblade. I can feel the raised ripple of the wide scar there through the fabric of his shirt.

“All right, all right,” he concedes, getting up and adjusting his newsboy cap on his head, leaving it a little crooked. “You blush a lot, y’know?”

“Shut up!”

He doesn’t say anything until after I’ve locked up the garage and we’re almost back to my house, drumming his fingers on the dashboard and looking aver at me for a few seconds before he finally asks, “So what are you gonna tell Eren? About me not being able to work for a few days, I mean.”

“I’ll tell him to take the repairs out of my paycheck if he’s really that pissed about it,” I shrug, shifting gears and squinting out through the dust cloud my truck is kicking up. “He won’t do it. And if he does, he’s an ass and oh well.”

“That’s…” he starts, looking out the window and pursing his lips.

“That’s what?”

Marco lets out the same soft little laugh that matches his Cheshire Cat smile, turning back to me and shaking his head. “I think that’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me.”

“I feel like you ain’t exactly had much niceness in your life,” I tell him, parking the truck out front and hopping down out of the driver’s side.

“Not really,” he shakes his head a genuine, warm smile settling on his lips as Ninette comes running out onto the porch with a happy squeal. “Not ‘til now, at least.”

Two years later and I’m still crawling out of the wreckage, but I finally feel like I’ve done something right.

 

 


	5. Marco

Stillness has never suited me. It’s impossible to tell if it was the childhood of working if you wanted to eat or the adulthood of running if you wanted to live that made me that way, but regardless of how it came about, it never fails to feel like there’s something uncomfortable crawling under my skin if I stay in the same place for too long. When I was eighteen I read a copy of Dante’s _Divine Comedy_ that had been sitting in a suitcase I stole off the cargo car of a train. Pretty boring shit, honestly, but the one part that I still remember is the vivid descriptions of what happens to sinners trapped in their respective Circles of Hell, the macabre punishments and grotesquely poetic sentences for whatever crimes against God that they’d committed.

I don’t know if I believe in God. I can’t put too much stock behind someone that’s got a whole nation praying every day for the means to provide for their families and still doesn’t lift a damned finger. Maybe the punishment for my doubts on top of everything else I’ve done is to feel eternally restless.

I’ve never seen anything that can put down roots in a ground that’s nothing but dust, anyway.

Still, it’s not so bad at the Kirschteins’, even if I’ve got a persistent prickle at the back of my neck, even if old instincts make me always take the seat closest to the door and sleep lightly. It’s better than being the unwelcome stray that Connie dragged home with him. I don’t feel hated here, and that’s one thing of many I experience over the next week or so that hasn’t happened to me in years. I can’t remember the last time I spent so many nights in a row sleeping in a real bed, and the memories of going to sleep without a consistently growling stomach are even more distant than that. The sun rises, the sun sets, and I start to think that maybe I’m not doomed to being eternally unsettled after all.

Jean leaves before everyone else is awake most mornings, the engine of his truck turning over with a weary grumble what wakes me up more often than not. If he minds sleeping on the couch while I make up for entire years of missed rest underneath the hand-stitched quilt on his bed, he doesn’t say anything about it. He gets up, leaves for work, and the day goes on. Ninette goes flying out of the house as soon as she can give her mother the slip, running barefoot up the road with blonde hair waving behind her like a battle banner, determined to soak up what’s left of the summer. The sun gets hotter, the dust kicks up. I try to help out around the house until Mrs. Kirschtein fusses that I shouldn’t be up moving around while I’m trying to heal, and I bite my tongue so I don’t tell her that movement would be a mercy since it’s about the only thing that can make the buzzing in my veins humming that I’ve been here too long go silent. Ninette blows back in on a cloud of dust sometime around the hottest part of the day, and a couple of times her mother catches a ride into town with a friend to run errands with my solemn vow to make sure that Nettie doesn’t get into any trouble while she’s gone. Jean comes home after dark, we all eat dinner, his mother and sister go to bed. We sit out on the front porch and have a few drinks and talk about nothing for a few hours. The moon rises, the moon sets, and it starts again.

I’m somewhere in the middle of the cycle when I bring my thoughts up to speed, sitting in the living room with Ninette and listening to the latest installment of _The Lone Ranger_ on the Kirschteins’ ancient behemoth of a radio. The heat is so oppressive that my focus has been drifting in and out, a fuzzy blank somewhere in the middle of the broadcast. Mrs. Kirschtein is in the kitchen canning tomatoes, Nettie’s sprawled out on her stomach in the middle of the floor with her feet kicking in a lazy flutter above her, and the Ranger and Tonto are in yet another tight spot that can only be solved with some unrealistically good sharpshooting.

“Hey, Marco,” she says.

“Mm?”

“Who d’you think could win in a fight against the Lone Ranger?”

“In a shootout, you mean?” I mumble lazily, letting my head fall back on the top of the couch and grabbing a section of today’s paper to fan myself with. “Billy the Kid.”

“But Billy the Kid was an outlaw!” Ninette lets out an indignant squawk, sitting up and whipping around to look at me so fast that her hair puffs out into a messy golden cloud around her bony shoulders.

“He sure was,” I shrug, looking over at her and feeling the corner of my mouth twitch into a smirk. “And there wasn’t a man alive who could out-draw him.”

“What about the man that shot him?”

I blink at her for a few seconds. “That’s irrelevant.”

“The Lone Ranger could so beat Billy The Kid,” Ninette grins at me victoriously, her tongue poking through the gap between her two front teeth.

Letting out a half-offended little snort, I put down the newspaper and raise an eyebrow at her. “I don’t believe he could, Miss Ninette.”

“He could.”

“He could not!”

“Could so!”

“Could not!”

“Ma!” she turns her head and hollers into the kitchen. “Who’s better, the Lone Ranger or Billy the Kid?”

“I don’t know, baby, but you need to turn the radio off and go get ready for Louise’s birthday party,” comes the weary reply over the hiss of boiling water, Mrs. Kirschtein’s head poking into the living room after a beat. “The Wagners’ll be here to pick us up any minute now.”

“Aw, _Ma_ ,” Ninette whines, smacking her palm on the floor. “I don’t even wanna go! Louise is a stuck-up little--”

“ _Now_ , Ninette.”

She flops over on her back with a drawn-out groan, looking up at the ceiling. “Can you braid my hair before we go? It’s hot.”

A series of bangs and glassy clinks serves as a response. “I’m a little busy here.”

“Maaaaaa!”

“I can do it,” I shrug, hopping up off the couch and throwing the newspaper down on the sunken cushions. From where I’m standing, I can see Mrs. Kirschtein turn around in the kitchen and tilt her head in my direction. Reaching up and scratching at the back of my head, I give her a smile and try not to make it as sad as it could be. “I got a little sister. I know how to do this stuff.”

Ninette comes running over with a hairbrush, looking up at me with a crooked grin that looks exactly like her big brother’s. “You got a sister? What’s her name?”

“Maura.” The name comes out softer than it should, experimental, like I’m trying to call up a ghost. A second passes, two, and I have to physically shake the memories off, painting on a happier expression as I flop back down on the couch and tug Ninette up onto my lap. “C’mere, little darlin’, let’s get that hair fixed.”

“Marco and Maura. That’s sweet,” says Mrs. Kirschtein, walking out of the kitchen and wiping her hands on her apron.

“It’s sweet until you hear what the rest of the kids’ names are,” I laugh, brushing the knots out of Ninette’s hair and starting to wind it into a long braid down her back. “I’m second-to-youngest out of seven. Miles, Maddox, Matthew, Martin, Michael, Marco, and Maura. My folks had a thing for M’s.”

“Big family, huh?” she nods, running a hand through her hair. “I can’t imagine wrangling seven. Two’s more than I can handle.”

“Well, you sorta needed seven kids to keep a cattle ranch up and runnin’ smooth.” Ninette hands me a faded ribbon as I finish up the braid, and I tie it into a tight bow, remembering holding a different little girl with a big smile and quick wit, thinking that maybe feeling like I was drowning every day might have been worth it for her sake right up until that option was taken from me.

They made my little sister go to my funeral. Connie saw her. Told me she cried like her world was breaking.

“A farm boy. I can tell by your manners,” Mrs. Kirschtein chuckles, grabbing a hat and her purse off the coat rack by the front door. “City boys wouldn’t compliment my cooking nearly as much.”

“Yes, ma’am, from right outside Telico,” I tell her, setting Nettie back on her feet. It doesn’t strike me for a few more seconds that I’ve told Jean’s mother more about my past in a minute than I’ve told him or anyone else in four years. She’s got a way of pulling things out of people before they even know what they’re saying. I wonder fleetingly how Jean managed to get away with anything growing up.

“Well, your folks did a fine job raising you,” she beams, walking over and patting my hair down into place. I can’t remember the last time my own mother touched me with anything close to tenderness, and it’s stupid, so stupid, but I feel this horrible tightness in my chest that doesn’t fade even when she grabs Ninette’s hand and heads for the front door. “I bet they’re real proud.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I choke out. I used to be a good liar.

The sound of tires scrapes up the road outside, and Mrs. Kirschtein turns around in the doorway, giving me a little wave. “We’ll be back this evening. You just rest now, alright? There are some leftovers on the counter if you get hungry.”

I swallow hard and nod, holding my breath until the sound of the car fades into the distance.

The radio sputters and crackles, white noise, white noise, and I don’t know how long I’ve even been sitting here on the couch by myself. The fever’s been stubborn and hasn’t been helped by the heat. Sometimes I lose myself, move around in a haze. Stillness has never suited me, and my skin crawls with every second that I sit there, but my limbs are lead and I can’t move. Somewhere in the minutes or hours that have passed, the radio program has ended, replaced with distant, distorted swing music. My thoughts are sluggish, amorphous ribbons of memories I haven’t touched in years mixing with Ninette’s laughter and files on steel bars and the way Jean hums along to the radio when he works. My body can’t move the way it wants, so now it’s just my mind that’s unsettled.

All the things I’ve done, all the charges I’ve racked up, but at least no one’s ever accused me of being sane.

The screen door slams open with a sharp bang, jarring me out of my own head. I blink blearily, turning around and thinking that it can’t already be time for Mrs. Kirschtein and Ninette to be back, but it’s not either of them standing in the doorway. It’s Jean, looking rumpled and completely terrified, work shirt half untucked and motor oil still smeared up his arms, eyes wide as dinner plates.

“Ain’t you s’posed to be at work?” I mumble, kicking my feet up on the coffee table.

“Where are Mom and Ninette?” he says tightly, head snapping back and forth as he keeps looking out the door.

“Hm?”

Jean sucks in a sharp gasp of a breath, pulling a hand through his hair and biting back a string of curses. “Marco. _Where the hell are Mom and Ninette?!”_

My brain still doesn’t want to work right, processing the rawness in his voice too slowly as I get up and shove my hands in my pockets, shrugging at him.“Went to a birthday party for one of Nettie’s school friends. Said they’d be back this evening.”

“Shit,” he hisses, pacing back and forth, eyes fixed outside the door before he slams his hand hard enough against the frame that I hear the wood crack. _“Shit!”_

“What’s gotten into you?” I ask, walking over to him with a frown.

“That,” Jean snaps, pointing out the screen door.

“Oh,” I whisper. “Shit.”

Out on the horizon, rapidly growing closer, there’s a black cloud all the way from the sky to the ground. Dust storm. A bad one.

I can see the reflection of the storm’s approach in Jean’s eyes, the cloud stretching out across amber irises and darkening them as they harden and he grits his teeth, yanking the door open. “I’m going after them.”

“The hell you are,” I snort, pulling the door shut. “That storm’ll be here in five minutes. Ain’t no way you can beat it.”

He’s not even listening, trying to shove my arm out of the way and get to the door again. “Move.”

“So you can get yourself killed? I’ll pass.”

I’m still peaky and off-balance from what’s left of the fever, and Jean uses that to his advantage, landing a solid push against my shoulder that sends me stumbling out of the way. Seething, he grabs a threadbare jacket off the coat rack and grabs a set of car keys from his jeans pocket, glaring at me like I’m the bad guy here as he yanks the door open again. “My mom and sister are out there, you can’t expect me to--”

“Dammit, Jean, _listen_.” My hands knot up in the lapels of his shirt, yanking him back inside and spinning him around until his back hits the wall hard. For the first time since he came in the house, he pauses. I don’t even realize how close we are until I’m inhaling the shaky breath he lets out, until I can see the dust motes caught in his eyelashes.

Funny. The thought that he’s beautiful hits me simultaneously with the thought that he’s a complete idiot.

“Listen,” I say again, softer, although I still don’t back up enough to give him the chance to dive out the door. “They’re _fine_. They left ages ago. Right now they’re in someone’s house. They’re safe. And you ain’t doing anyone a lick of good by runnin’ out into a duster like that for no good reason. Now sit down, have a drink, and get your fool head on straight while I go lock up. We’re gonna be here awhile.”

A few seconds pass, and he swallows, Adam’s apple bobbing sharply along the column of his throat before he nods. My hands relax in the fabric of his shirt, settling briefly on his shoulders before I let him go and set about making sure all the shutters are closed, wet towels shoved under the seam of the door and the windows. It’s dark as midnight outside by the time I’m done, the ominous scrape of dust against the house mixing with the howl of the wind. The radio is nothing but static. I flip it off with a sigh and wonder if this is part of my eternal damnation too.

Jean’s curled in on himself in one of the rickety kitchen chairs with a death grip on a generously-poured whiskey, the tremors shooting down his arm making the amber liquid slosh around in the glass. He’s three gulps in before he deems himself capable of speaking to me, gesturing sharply at an empty glass in front of the chair next to him. “Went up to the front room to get some paperwork and saw it comin’ in. Eren closed up the shop, told me I should go home, check on Mom and Nettie. When I came back and they weren’t here…”

“You blew your wig and were ready to go on a suicide mission when they’re safe and sound at a birthday party, yeah, I noticed,” I reply drily, pouring myself a drink and sitting down. “You okay?”

“Yeah, just… just gimme a minute.” Eventually, his breaths come a little easier and the shaking dies down, less fear and more fatigue on his face when he looks up at me. “Thanks, Marco.”

“What, for throwing you up against a wall like something out of a trashy romance novel? Anytime,” I smirk, the fact that he’s drunk and I plan to be soon making me a little braver than I probably should be.

It’s hard to tell with how dark it is, but I could swear that Jean’s face turns an impressive shade of red. He sputters for a second before managing to laugh and say, “For stopping me, I mean. I wasn’t… Didn’t have my head in the right place.”

“Yeah, well, when you do armed robbery for a living you learn to assess the danger of situations pretty quick,” I shrug, knocking back half my drink and grimacing against the burn working its way down my throat.

Jean shakes his head and whispers, “God, I keep forgetting that.”

“Forgetting what?”

He leans forward, elbows on the table and chin perched on the heel of his hands as he watches me carefully. “That you’re a criminal.”

“I prefer the term ‘outlaw.’ Has a nicer ring to it.” Grinning, I mirror his movement and lean across the table as well. “And you’re harboring a fugitive, Jean Kirschtein, which makes you an outlaw too.”

“Guess I am,” he says with this cocky little smirk that’s about seventeen times more attractive than it has any right to be, finishing off his drink, and I _do not_ pay attention to the way the alcohol clings to his lips in a bittersweet veneer, I _do not_ entertain detailed mental images of kissing it off, I _do not_ try to do some quick math to figure out just how much weight the kitchen table could hold.

Christ, I don’t like the person I am when I drink whiskey. Logic goes out the window and I try to fuck everything with pretty eyes and a magnetic smile.

“So when’s the last time you actually cleaned that thing?” Jean asks after a minute, pointing at my chest and the flash of bandages visible under the first few buttons of my shirt I popped open to deal with the heat after the girls left.

I frown, count on my fingers. “Three days?”

“Dammit, Marco, you wanna get gangrene or some shit?!”

“I can’t help it!” I lash back defensively, crossing my arms and wincing at the motion. “I chicken out every time I try. That iodine hurts like a sonuvabitch.”

“Oh for God’s sakes,” he rolls his eyes, jumping up and walking back the hall to the bathroom, returning a few seconds later with a handful of gauze and a bottle of iodine. “If you’re gonna be a baby about it, I’ll do it.”

“You’re drunk, kid.”

“And _you’re_ gonna have a nasty festering wound unless someone takes care of it,” he huffs, dumping the stuff on the table and rolling up his sleeves before going to wash the motor oil off his hands in the kitchen sink. “So either go do it yourself or shut up and take your shirt off.”

I rest my chin in my hand and sigh wistfully. “If I had a nickel for every time I’ve been given that ultimatum…”

“Don’t be a smart-ass,” Jean snaps, soaking a wad of gauze brown with iodine and looking at me expectantly. Grumbling, I shell off my shirt and peel the bandages back, letting out a little hiss. It’s easy to forget how much the cut hurts until I’m trying to clean it. The stupid thing doesn’t even look that much better than it did a week ago, still healing slowly. Jean sucks in a breath and blinks hurriedly for a few seconds, pressing the hand that isn’t holding the gauze against my forehead. “And you still got that fever, too.”

“I’ll be alright - agh!” I start, cut off by him pressing the gauze against the cut without warning, the iodine feeling like liquid fire where it touches the injured skin. On instinct, I go to jump forward, out of the chair and away from the pain, but Jean presses his free hand to my chest to keep me in my seat, fingers settling like puzzle pieces in the valleys between my ribs.

He doesn’t have hands that were meant to work on cars and haul boxes. They’re more elegant than that, slender palms and spindly, almost delicate fingers, fragile-looking but definitely dextrous and strong enough to keep me in place as he keeps dabbing at the cut. Musician’s hands. I think back to his story of his trumpet sitting on a pawnshop shelf and feel suddenly sad.

“Just hold still,” he mutters, frowning in concentration. He gets this little furrow between his eyebrows when he’s thinking too hard about something, and you can almost see the tunnel-vision, his entire attention spiraling inward to the task at hand. I’ve seen him look at cars in the shop like that a few times, but being the subject of that scrutiny makes something hot and corrosive sink in the pit of my stomach, sparking out through my limbs. I tell myself that the deep breaths I’m pulling in are to combat the pain. A few more spikes of discomfort, and then Jean looks up at me with a little twitch of a smile. “There. All done.”

He doesn’t make any effort to move. I’m sure as hell not complaining. “Y’know, I think I like you better than your nurse friend.”

“Bah. I ain’t nearly as good at this stuff as Mikasa is.” Shaking his head, Jean finally stands up to clear off the table. Maybe it’s the booze and the fever making me hypersensitive, but I swear I can feel the drag of every fingertip along my ribs as he pulls his hand away. “You can put new bandages on yourself. I ain’t coddling you to that extent.”

The next few hours pass with me winding another stretch of bandages around my waist, the dust storm raging outside, and the two of us getting far more drunk than is wise or prudent. Jean’s a happy drunk, a talkative drunk, and I’m content to just sit back and watch him laugh as he goes off on tangents about his little sister and work and a whole compendium of embarrassing stories about Eren. That little dimple on his cheek that carves a curve into the plane of his face when he smiles is much more interesting than anything he’s telling me, but I smile and nod along, throwing in a word edgewise every once in a while.

I don’t even realize for the longest time that I’ve been staying in the same place for hours, and not a single instinct is screaming at me to move.

Eventually we run out of whiskey and get up to stumble into the hallway, laughing like a pair of fools and using the furniture and each other for support. Jean’s markedly more intoxicated than I am, trips halfway back the hall and falls against the wall, tugging me with him.

“You okay, kid?” I laugh, holding him upright while he howls like I’ve just told him the funniest joke in history.

“I’m _fine_ , I’m… hey.” He goes from laughing to dead serious in a second flat, scowling and poking my shoulder with one bony finger. “Hey. Don’t call me a kid. I’m eighteen, I’m an adult.”

“Alright, alright, don’t get testy.” He frowns even more, and the expression is so goddamned adorable that I can’t stop myself from grinning, swaying on my feet and accidentally-on-purpose leaning into him. To my (admittedly compromised) mind, I’m in the clear. I’ve been testing the waters for weeks now, playing it even more carefully than I usually do, and I’ve gotten nothing but positive responses. No time like the present, right?

I really, really hate the person I am when I drink whiskey.

“Just don’t want you to look at me like I’m some dumb kid,” Jean says, all trace of slurring gone from his voice as it drops a half octave. There’s still the brightness from the alcohol in his eyes, but there’s something else, too, a dark flash that tugs his pupils wider as they flick down and up again.

“Trust me, the way I’m lookin’ at you sure as hell ain’t like you’re some dumb kid,” I hum, leaning in closer. Our noses brush, and I swear to God I feel like a lightning bolt’s gone down my spine.

Jean gulps in a breath, blinks a few times. Disentangles himself from between me and the wall and hops back almost like he’s been burned. “I, uh… I’m gonna go lay down? Yeah. And you… you should go rest. Your bandages. And stuff.”

“Yeah.”

God _dammit._

I wait until I make sure that he gets to the couch safely before continuing back the hallway, ducking into the bathroom instead of Jean’s room despite a bed sounding wonderful to my dizzy head. The mirror over the sink is cracked, distorting my reflection as I splash a handful of cold water on my face and shake my head slowly back and forth.

“You’re in deep, you idiot,” I whisper to the fractured version of myself staring back at me. “You’re in _so_ fuckin’ deep.”

And strangely enough, I don’t mind it as much as I probably should. Stillness has never suited me, and yet the thought spins across my brain as I’m lying in Jean Kirschtein’s bed drunk off my ass with the smell of him clinging to the pillowcases that I’ve never been so happy to be the calm in the middle of the storm before.

 


	6. Jean

I fall asleep praying that I'm drunk enough to forget everything that happened from the moment I came back into my house with a dust storm on my tail, and only find that fate has it out for me. I'm not drunk enough to forget, but I'm exactly drunk enough to dream about it through the endless, fuzzy hours as the alcohol works its way out of my body.

It's like a slow-motion replay, a running loop of my back against the wall, the hazel flash of Marco's eyes, his breath painting itself in a warm wash across my lips. Ceaseless repetitions of the little smirk he gave me in the kitchen, of bandages and iodine bottles, and I swear after having my subconscious hounding me with drunken memories for what seems like an eternity, I could probably point out every freckle between his collarbone and waistband by memory alone. I dream of drunken laughter and stumbling feet and the feeling of being too close but not close enough. I dream so deep and so vivid that I start to wonder if any of it happened at all, if I'll just wake up under a car in the garage with Eren grumbling that he's not paying me to catch up on my beauty sleep.

But then I wake up to sunlight streaming through the shutters on the living room window and a screaming hangover headache, and the reality settles cold in my gut despite the heavy heat winding its way through the house. It was all far too real.

Panic claws up my throat  with razored talons, eyes screwed shut like if I don’t open them I won’t have to acknowledge anything. Won’t have to acknowledge how (surprise, surprise) I screwed up.

Maybe in some places times are changing, maybe you hear about big cities up North where _those people_ \- that’s the terminology Dad always used, and I can still hear the venom in his long-gone voice - can live life reasonably quietly, tight-knit little communities in urban neighborhoods that the rest of the world glosses over. But this is Texas in nineteen-thirty-fucking-four, and nothing here has changed for the better since the days when saying something contrary to the Good Book meant a lynch mob coming after you. Hell, the only one of _those people_ I’ve ever even heard of living in Dallas was some guy that worked for one of Dad’s partner companies, and the whole thing blew up into a massive scandal. We heard a few weeks later that he’d packed up and moved out of state, but I don’t think I ever quite believed it, nine years old and facing down the harrowing truth about what happens to people here that step out of line.

I did what I was supposed to do. I looked out for my family’s best interests, like a good son. Nine years old and feeling an invisible noose tightening around my neck, I took the truth and stomped it down, shoved it into the deepest part of my chest and locked it up so tightly that no one including me could touch it. I lived my life, my life came crashing down around me, but that little box of secrets stayed shut tight for nine years, and even if it was only to myself in the darkest part of the night, that accomplishment was something I could be proud of.

Or at least it was until a bottle of sub-par whiskey and a fugitive with a blank-slate past and a Cheshire Cat smile shot it all to hell. I think back to the dreams draining away like water through my fingers, and that’s all I can remember, the cloying taste of alcohol and the curve of Marco’s grin and something that had to have been unadulterated want curling in the pit of my stomach.

God help me.

My eyes snap open. Nothing to do now but pick up the pieces, realize my lapse and learn from it. I roll off the couch with a soft groan, my head throbbing in time with my heartbeat and a faint, repetitive shushing noise from the kitchen. When I peek through the doorway, Mom is sweeping thin lines of dust out into the hallway, immaculate in her threadbare dress and looking the picture of control. I’m across the room and hugging her tightly before I even have time to process that I’ve moved at all, sucking in a ragged breath. “Thank God, you’re okay.”

The broom falls to the kitchen floor with a clatter and she hugs me back with a soft smile, a hand coming up to smooth my messy hair down. “Of course I am. I got more bluster in me than one of those dust storms any day.”

“Nettie?” I ask, pulling back and taking a quick look around the kitchen.

“Outside sweeping off the porch. We were getting ready to leave the party when the storm rolled in, ended up staying the night at Louise’s house. Don’t look so worried, Jean, everything turned out alright.”

But I have to worry, because worrying makes it easier. If I worry, I don’t have space to think about anything else. It’s easier for me to nod and whirl around and run outside, refusing to calm down until I see my little sister with my own eyes, her long blonde braid thumping rhythmically against her back as she goes at the sinking floorboards of the porch with a broom like the house has personally wronged her. It’s easier to feel the ache of the wood colliding with my knees as I kneel down and yank her into my arms, holding her until she squirms and laughs and tells me to let go before I give her cooties.

“I’m your big brother. You can catch cooties from little punks like that Wagner kid, but not me,” I snort, ruffling the top of her head until spun-gold strands of hair escape from her braid. “I was worried sick about you, alright, you can live through one stinkin’ hug.”

“Miss Ninette, would you be so kind as to come help me out with these windowsills?” The voice comes from around the front corner of the house, smooth baritone, and it’s too late for me to retreat back into the house, it’s too late, I can’t even move, rooted to the porch and wishing I was still asleep. Marco rounds the corner and hops up onto the porch, throwing a dusty hand towel over his shoulder with one hand while pulling a cigarette out of his pocket with the other. He’s washed up and changed since last night, a fresh shirt and that damned newsboy cap sitting crooked on his head, the smell of aftershave wafting through the smoke when he lights the cigarette and looks up at me with a soft smile. “Oh, hey there. I told your mom to let you sleep. You were pretty tuckered out last night.”

I screwed up. I screwed up so badly that I can’t even fathom it.

“I, uh…” I croak, choking on dust and my heart hammering in my throat as I look at my shoes, at Ninette wiping off the window, at anything except his lips and the could-have-been’s that still cling to them. There’s no possibility of escape, and I’ve resigned myself to dying of shame here and now when my hand brushes the car keys still in my pocket and my chance at redemption explodes in my head like a grenade. “I, uh… I gotta go. Check on something. At the shop.”

“It’s your day off,” Marco frowns, and God, how can he stand there looking like nothing’s wrong? Maybe he got to drunk to remember anything. I start praying with every fiber of my soul that he got too drunk to remember anything.

“I know, I just, uh… I’ll be back.”

Time jumps, and I’m in the truck headed up the road, faster than I should be driving in my efforts to outrun the clamor rising in my head. I’m miles away from the house before I can finally think straight, a wave of calm washing over me as the engine rattles up through the steering wheel and numbs my hands. I’ve done this before. Hell, I’ve done it as a little kid who barely understood the meaning of what he was suppressing. So my little box of secrets got knocked open. There’s a way to fix that.

Stomp it down. Lock it up. Remind myself of who I am.

Who I have to be.

I don’t go into downtown Dallas that often. It’s a waste of gas, and besides, the memories of my old life hang a little too heavily around the place for it to be comfortable. I drive past my old school and swear I can see myself walking home with the boys from my class, shoving each other back and forth and yanking our ties off the second we got out the door. My route doesn’t take me past my old house, but I can see the roof jutting over the buildings in the distance, and that’s more than close enough. As devastated as I was to lose everything else, I was more than willing to leave that place. They could never really get the bloodstains out of the floor.

The hospital is as overcrowded and busy as usual, but I manage to snag a place to park on the street, shutting the truck’s engine off with a weary rattle and hopping out into a narrow miss with oncoming traffic. Jittery and breathless, I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the windshield. Hollow-eyed, face drawn up in anxiety, still in my work clothes from yesterday, messy hair and a day’s stubble. I was passed out for God knows how long, and I look like I haven’t slept in a week. I feel like I’ll never sleep again.

This is my consequence. This is my penance for skirting too close to something I should have stayed away from. This is what he reduces me to.

I shake the thought out of my head and duck through the front door of the hospital, skirting around the lines of people waiting to be cared for, children and adults alike coughing up mouthfuls of dust and suffering from the one thing doctors can’t treat - starvation. There’s a staircase off one of the back hallways, and I vault up the steps two at a time, emerging on the second floor and snapping my head back and forth. I haven’t been here since Ninette was born. The maternity ward’s to the left, which means if I head right…

“Jean?”

I nearly jump out of my skin, whipping around to the source of the voice. Starched uniform. Black hair. Eyes like solid onyx.

This is who I am. This is who I have to be.

“Jean,” Mikasa repeats herself, frowning and walking over to me. She takes a quick glance down the hall, checking to make sure no one’s around before she reaches up and presses a cool hand to the side of my face, brows knitting together in concern. “Hey. Look at me. Are you alright? Did something happen to your mom? Ninette?”

“They’re fine,” I choke, closing a hand around her wrist as gently as I can in my panicked state and leading her down the hallway. “Just come with me for a second.”

She follows, and her voice is just as unflappably calm as ever when she speaks again, but the hand that comes up to rest on my arm speaks volumes for how unsettled both of us are. Mikasa doesn’t do comfort. If she feels the need to comfort you, you’re the kind of mess that’s already beyond repair. “You’re worrying me. Just tell me what’s going on.”

There’s a broom closet about halfway back to the stairs, the door unlocked when I try it. Muttering something unintelligible under my breath, I pull Mikasa in after me, watching the shadows on her face shifting in time with the swinging lightbulb over our heads. I can’t talk, can’t breathe, can’t think. My hands shake visibly when they come up to frame her face, and she presses her own steady palms over them to still the tremors, thumbs brushing over the ridges and valleys of my knuckles, and this, here, with her, this is who I am.

“Jean,” she says again, and the lilt of her voice is different, deeper.

I look at the half-confused frown still clinging to the corners of her mouth, and even though the rest of him is far away, all I can see is Marco’s smile.

I dart down across the height difference and press my lips to Mikasa’s hard enough to bruise.

This is who I have to be.

She tenses for a moment, caught off guard, and I come to my senses enough to start to pull back, sinking further into the long internal scream that’s berating me for thoroughly wrecking every aspect of my life. The last thing I expect her to do is tug me back in with this contented sigh that sounds completely wrong for her, fingers lacing back through the unholy mess of my hair in soothing little motions.

This has been coming for years. Everyone has been waiting for this. This is who I am. Who we are.

“Go steady with me.” My voice sounds broken when we part, pathetic, imploring. “I know that I’ve got my family to worry about and that your brother’s gonna kick my ass and that you’ve got your job, okay, I _know_ , Mikasa, but we can make it work. It has to work.”

I don’t tell her why it has to work. She doesn’t need to know the kind of convoluted shit that’s raging inside my brain. If there’s anyone capable of cleansing me of my own ruination, it’s her.

I half-expect her to shove me off and tell me to keep dreaming. Instead, she nods and strokes along my jawline and says, “All right. All right, I will, we will, Jean, just _breathe_.”

And I do. _All right._ I’m safe. I can practically hear a lock click as some of the panic shrinks back into my chest. “So, this is… we’re… you’re my girl now?”

“Guess I am. Figure everyone’s just been waitin’ on us to get the timing figured out, huh?” The little flash of a smile she shoots up at me makes my chest ache, such a rare thing on her face that I feel like I’ve just been given a gift I don’t come close to deserving. “But why now? Why’d you come running in here looking like you’ve seen a ghost all for this?”

“Because…” I start, trying to figure out how to dance around the details. “I feel like Alice.”

Mikasa frowns. “What?”

“I feel like Alice. I’ve been stuck down a fuckin’ rabbit hole with all kinds of hell, and I’m just trying to get home.” That’s it. That’s the truth. And looking at her, I can almost see the light above me, my one last shot to get out of this convoluted Wonderland for good.

My time for having dreams is over. I can only aspire to normalcy now, and I can’t even do that on my own.

“I know how hard it’s been on you since your dad,” she says solemnly, and I have to bite back a manic, humorless laugh. My dad’s about as far from the problem as he can get. But Mikasa doesn’t need to know that. No one does. It’s better for everyone involved to think that the state I’m in is the result of grief arriving years too late.

“Yeah. Yeah, and I just…” I suck in another shaky breath, twining my arms around her waist and burying my face in her hair, inhaling the smell of water lilies and hairspray. “I want a life. I’m tired of feeling like the next big gust of wind is gonna blow me off to God-knows-where. I want a life and I got no idea where to start.”

“You could start by kissing me again like you did just now.”

I do, hoping that it will make me feel more grounded.

“That was nice,” Mikasa hums after I pull back again, reaching up to adjust the little white cap on her head and looking up at me.

“Yeah. It was,” I nod, still a little shell-shocked.

She huffs and shakes her head, goes up on tiptoe to ghost her lips across my cheek. “Go home and rest. I’ll see you around, okay?”

By the time I manage a numb nod and a “Yeah, okay,” she’s already out the door and halfway up the hall.

I manage to bite the panic back until I get out of the hospital and back to my truck, leaning forward in the driver’s seat and feeling horror stab at the lining of my chest again.

Kissing Mikasa was nice. I liked it. It was something I could get used to. But her lips on mine weren’t nearly as nice as being two inches and some bad life choices away from Marco Bodt’s, and that realization is so viscerally terrifying that instead of dealing with it, I shut down. Start the truck. Pull off into the street, drive away.

Stomp it down. Lock it up.

I stop by the garage mainly because I’m in no state to go home, telling myself that the beating I get from Eren won’t be as bad if he hears the news from me before he hears it from Mikasa. He’s in the garage tinkering around under the hood of a Model A when I walk in, frowning as he looks up at me. “You look like hell.”

“Eren, listen,” I start, shifting nervously and trying to remember the best way to dodge his right hook. “I--”

“Jean!” The door to the front room slams open, and Marco comes breezing into the garage.

I feel like the world has fallen out from beneath my feet.

“Well, ring-a-ding-ding, ain’t this a fuckin’ party,” Eren grouses, glaring back and forth between the two of us. “Did you two goons come here to help out, or just to be a pain in my ass?”

“I came here lookin’ for him,” says Marco, pointing at me and looking confused. “He ran out of his house like a bat out of hell saying he had to come here and check on something.”

Eren blinks, frowning more deeply in confusion. “What would you need to check on here? It’s your day off.”

“I, uh…” I scramble for a lie, looking frantically back and forth between them. “I thought I left my wallet in my locker. I was gonna go shop for Ninette’s birthday present, so I needed money, couldn’t find my wallet. Turned out to be in the floor of the truck. Not an issue.”

Eren shrugs and goes back to working on the car, but Marco gives me a look that defines skepticism, meandering around the Model A’s front bumper and pursing his lips. “All right. I’ll just stick with you then. I hitched a ride into town and got no way back to your place. We might as well go run around together.”

God, take me now. Just get it over with and strike me down.

I couldn’t get that lucky. I just sit there stammering for a second before Eren whirls around and snaps, “Well whatever you two are gonna do, get the hell outta my garage. I got a business to run here, not a social club.”

Marco waits until we’re back outside to say what he’d been biting back in the garage, grabbing me by the elbow and tugging me down the narrow alley between the front room and the closed tailor’s shop next door. “All right, what the hell’s gotten into you?”

 _You!_ I want to scream, caught between wanting to punch him and wanting to do something far more horrifying, fists clenching up at my sides as I fight to refrain from either. _You’re what’s gotten into me with your stupid smile and your big outlaw plans and how you look at me like I’m not just another half-dead charity case in this shithole town, you, you, you--_

“Nothing,” I tell him, my face as impassive as I can make it. “I was still a little drunk when I got up this morning, felt a little loopy. Hell, I don’t even remember what happened last night after I got home.”

“You don’t?” he asks, and I am so beyond delusional for letting myself think he sounds a little wounded.

“Nah. It all blurs out after I helped you with those bandages,” I lie, pointing at the flash of white beneath his shirt collar and shrugging.

Marco nods a little stiffly, walks back out into the street with his hands jammed in his pockets. “So. Ninette’s present.”

“Oh, uh, yeah.” Sputtering, I jog to catch up with him, darting across the street. “Figured we’d just go to the pawnshop. They got nice stuff in there that ain’t too awfully expensive. Nettie’s easy to shop for. Little girls like dolls, right?”

“Get her a baseball mitt,” Marco says. I laugh, and he looks over at me, an eyebrow raising. “I mean it. When’s the last time you saw her with a doll? You wanna know what she does when you’re at work every day? She goes down the street and plays sandlot baseball with the Reebs boys and that little Wagner brat and a couple of the Zerumskis. Jean, I ain’t shittin’ you, that little girl can pitch a better fastball than any of ‘em. I watched a game the other day, I swear on my life, the kid throws like the fuckin’ Bambino. You want her to appreciate her birthday present? Get her a ball and a mitt.”

“My mom would skin me alive.”

He stops short right outside the pawnshop door, turns around and looks me dead in the eye. “Life’s too short to waste it messin’ around with a bunch of shit that don’t make you happy, Jean. Everyone in your family deserves to be happy. Y’all should start taking steps to make it happen.”

God, why do I feel like he’s not talking about Ninette?

“Alright, alright, I’ll get her a ball and a mitt,” I snort, yanking the door open and ducking inside. Of course he was talking about Ninette. Of course he was.

The pawnshop is jam-packed full of people, and the shelves are all but overflowing. There’s no real organization to the place, so I have to just start from the very first shelf, combing down the aisles and seeing if there’s anything I could grab that would work for a birthday gift. Plenty of jewelry, gold chains and wedding rings and fancy pocket watches. Some nice china, a few antique porcelain figurines, little silver filigree napkin rings.

“Hey, look here!” Marco pipes up behind me, running over with a little, careworn ukulele in his hand. Grinning like a kid at Christmas, he strums a few chords and nods to himself. “Nice sound. I’m gettin’ this.”

“You’re broke,” I point out.

“So?”

“Marco, _no_ ,” I hiss, snatching the ukulele out of his hand.

“Marco, _yes_ ,” he retorts, grabbing it back and wandering down the aisle strumming the chords and humming the melody to ‘I’ve Got The World On A String.’ I roll my eyes and go to take the damned thing again, but he dances out of my way with a laugh and an infuriatingly cheeky wink. “There’s a baseball mitt over there, by the way.”

Grumbling a string of vague insults, I walk over to the shelf he nods at, pulling the reasonably new-looking baseball mitt off the shelf. It’s made for a kid, small enough to fit Nettie’s hand, and little-used enough that she can break it in herself. Nodding my approval, I turn around to head for the counter but get stopped short in my tracks.

When Marco finds his way over to me again, he’s got the ukulele in hand and a ridiculously feathery woman’s hat perched over his newsboy cap. “What’s eatin’ you, kid?”

“I told you not to call me a kid. It’s nothing,” I shake my head, starting to walk away, but he follows my line of sight up to the top shelf, his smile dying when he sees the  painstakingly polished brass Martin trumpet sitting there like a crowning achievement. I swallow hard, take another few steps, but I can’t make myself turn my back on it.

“That yours?” he asks.

“It used to be,” I reply softly, almost feeling a physical ache when I force myself to look away and walk back to the counter. “Come on. It’s stuffy in here, I wanna get this thing and get out.”

Marco goes to put his own findings back while I’m waiting in line, sauntering over once I’m up to the front and leaning on the counter as the pawnbroker picks up the ball and mitt and looks them over. “That’ll be a buck even, son.”

“You’re _joking_ ,” I gape, looking back and forth between him and the merchandise. “A dollar. For a baseball mitt.”

“That’s business, kid. Take it or leave it.”

Fuming, I go to reach in my pocket for my wallet, only to find that it’s empty. Did I actually leave it in the truck? “Hold on, I gotta--”

“No you don’t,” Marco cuts me off, pulling a wallet from his pocket. Mine. “You didn’t go to the garage to get your wallet, and you didn’t leave it in your truck, because you ran off and left it sittin’ on the kitchen table. I don’t know why you left or what you did today, Jean, but I’m gonna go ahead and tell you right now that it ain’t in your best interests to bullshit a bullshitter. I haven’t met a man who can out-lie me yet.”

I can’t even bring myself to say anything, just grab the wallet from him and slap a dollar bill on the counter before scooping up the baseball and mitt and making a beeline for the door. It’s the kind of situation that would usually make Marco annoyingly pleased with himself, but now he just looks pensive and almost sad, following me back across the street to the truck and not saying a word until we’re a good ways up the road.

“A dollar for a baseball mitt is highway robbery. And I know a thing or two about highway robbery,” he muses when we’re about halfway back to my house, rolling up his left pant leg and untucking the skinny part of the ukulele from his sock. “Figured I’d make sure you got your money’s worth.”

“Lord have mercy,” I groan, letting my head fall against the back of my seat.

“Not on me, he won’t,” Marco grins, an expression that’s a little too feral for a freckly, doe-eyed man-child holding a ukulele. “With all the shit I done, no way I’m gonna see heaven. I figure I’m at least entitled to raise a little hell.”

I bark out a laugh, giving him a sidelong glance. “That’s poetic.”

“Nothin’ better to do in prison than read. I’m a fan of Oscar Wilde.”

“You’re something else,” I huff, shaking my head. “An ex-con that read poetry in his jail cell and shoplifts ukuleles. What the hell did you do that was so bad it got you locked up?”

Marco’s smile falters a little, his eyes darting out the window as we pull up to the house. “Maybe one day you’ll find out.”

I don’t want to find out, I realize too late. I don’t want to get drawn any further into his gravity than I already have. I want to take the life I carved out for myself in a hospital broom closet today and settle in it and learn to be content. Marco said that life was too short to waste it on anything but happiness, but he doesn’t understand that contentment is the best that most people can get. Happiness, _real_ happiness, that’s rare. And even when you find it, it often disappears too soon, slips between the cracks of your life like dust under a windowsill, spirals off on the wind. You go off chasing it, and you run into a storm. I don’t want that.

I don’t. I _don’t_.

Maybe if I say it to myself enough times, that will make it true.

“Oh, and Jean?” he says once we’re out of the car, headed for the porch.

“Yeah?”

“Back at the pawnshop, you said ‘I told you not to call me kid.’ And you did tell me that. Right before you went over and passed out on the couch. If you’re gonna lie about not remembering last night, at least try not to give yourself away.” He’s ahead of me, so I can’t see his face, but his shoulders are tight as he yanks the front door open and disappears inside. I’m left standing on the porch with Ninette’s birthday present in my hands, bloody nails digging into the edge of the rabbit hole before I lose my grip and fall down, down, down, all over again.

The thought that I’ve upset him makes me feel sick.

The implication of what that means makes me feel sicker.

I hide the mitt under my shirt and wave off Mom and Ninette, retreating into my room and collapsing against the door, trying to breathe. Stomp it down, lock it up.

My little box of secrets shudders, creaks, and shatters into a million pieces. It’s not until you’re curled up on your bedroom floor letting out panicked, sobbing wails into a pillow that smells like someone you shouldn’t want that you realize just how hard of a punch reality can pack.

 


	7. Marco

After the trip to the pawnshop, Jean acts differently towards me, and although he probably thinks he’s being clever, it’s not too damn hard to figure out why.

He leaves for work earlier in the morning and comes home later, finds things to do and errands to run for his mother that keep him busy. He takes Ninette out to the movie he’s been promising her since the day I met him, picks up extra shifts at the garage, pointedly avoids eye contact and conversation whenever he can.

He’s avoiding me.

At first, the realization just aches, sinks like a rock in my chest and spreads out through every cell of me until I feel bruised from the inside out. I wasn’t supposed to get this invested. Hell, I’ve never gotten this invested before, and that alone would be enough to terrify me even without everything else on top of it. The plan was simple. Spend a few days laying low, fool around with the ridiculously attractive mechanic as a temporary distraction, and hightail it the hell out of Texas by the end of the week.

It’s going on a month, the closest I’ve gotten to Jean is one too many drinks and an almost-kiss that I might as well have missed by a thousand miles, and North is starting to seem cold and undesirable when I think about seeing it alone.

And the longer this goes on, the more he converses with me in one-word shut-downs, the more times I catch him watching me when I’ve been looking the other direction, that ache in the core of me starts to lessen, replaced by sharp sparks of irritation. It would be a different matter if what happened the night of the dust storm hadn’t played out the way it did, if he wasn’t _like that._ God knows I’ve dealt with honest rejection and a few black eyes from miscalculated attempts before. I know what that looks like.

It doesn’t look like Jean Kirschtein.

For all his bluster about being treated like an adult, Jean looks like a scared little boy. I’ve felt enough fear in my life to see it flash across his eyes whenever he looks at me, and it makes me want to scream, because I don’t want to feel it jamming like a blade between my ribs, I don’t want it to hurt, I don’t _want_ to care. Caring has never been the advantage. It’s what makes you get emotional and sloppy. It’s what gets you hurt, gets you killed. I was supposed to be far, far away by now.

Wanting him was part of the plan. Caring about him wasn’t.

So Jean’s avoiding me. There’s nothing I can do about that. All I can do is try to forget that the sense of helplessness that brings down upon me is enough to feel like it’s crushing my lungs. I can pretend nothing’s wrong because I’m nothing if not a good liar, can sit around and laugh with Ninette and help Mrs. Kirschtein out around the house while my cut finally finishes healing even though it feels like other wounds are getting pulled open. I can lie to myself every bit as well as Jean can - I’ve had more practice - and start reevaluating under the painted-on smile. The plan needs to change. I need to re-evaluate and rebuild it to compensate for my own mistakes, because at this rate the only result I’ll get is the gut-wrenching reality of having to sit and watch him as he runs away.

My first day back at the garage, I finally realize just how much he’s been running.

I’m trying to figure out what’s keeping the old Dodge I’m working on from starting when Mikasa walks in, don’t think anything of it until Jean drops what he’s doing and walks over to her with that crooked smile, wiping the oil off his hands so it doesn’t smudge when he reaches up to touch her face.

He leans forward and kisses her right on the mouth, and he looks straight at me while he does it. Makes sure I’m watching. I feel like the floor has fallen out from underneath me.

He’s been running. He’s been running so hard and so far that he's barely a speck on the horizon.

Mikasa doesn’t stay long, something about her break and wanting to make sure they were still on for dinner tonight before she picks up her things and breezes out of the garage. Jean watches her go, nods to himself like he’s gotten some kind of confirmation and reaches over to grab his wrench from the workbench again.

I slam my hand down on it before he can pick it up. “Thought you said you didn’t have time for a girl.”

“Things changed,” he mutters, refusing to look at me and grabbing for the wrench again.

“Things changed awful fast.”

There’s no softness to him, voice pure acid as he scowls up at me and spits, “Why do you care?”

“I don’t. I don’t care.” The last word wobbles a bit, and I feel like kicking myself for it. “I’m just sayin’. This is all real sudden.”

“You don’t even know what’s sudden; don’t give me that shit,” Jean snaps, stalking back over to shut the door to the front room so Eren and whoever else is up there can’t hear us. Afraid one of us will let something slip. “I’ve known her since we were kids. Everyone saw this coming, it ain’t sudden at all.”

“Oh, so everyone _expected_ you to end up with her,” I lash back with a cold, humorless laugh, slamming the Dodge’s hood down with a hollow clang. “That makes sense.”

His eyes narrow and he says, “What do you mean by that?”

“You seem to put a lot of effort into doing what people expect of you, Jean.”

He’s quiet for a long stretch, eyes fixed on the engine he’s working on. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“It can be,” I tell him, walking over and leaning against the opposite side of the car. “It can be a damn tragedy, especially if the person you are and the person everyone expects you to be are two completely different people.”

Jean’s frown deepens, and he leans down to squint at something lodged under the exhaust valve. Look at me. Dammit, _look at me._

“Yeah, well you’d know a lot about that, wouldn’t you?” he finally mutters.

The faded lines across my shoulders sear like new wounds. _Our son is dead._ “More than you could possibly imagine.”

“We can’t all run away from our families because we have some stupid pipe dream about being the next Al Capone, Marco,” Jean practically snarls, finally snapping his head up to look at me and throwing his wrench on the floor with a clang. “Some of us have more decency and responsibility than that.”

Something bright red flashes across my vision, and the next thing I process is the shudder of Jean’s back colliding with the side of the car as I yank him forward by the collar and slam him back against the passenger door, close enough that I can see the motion of tawny irises swallowed up by his pupils for a split second before they shrink back down and the fear kicks in, his whole body tensing under the fist wadded up in the fabric of his shirt.

“You,” I hum, and it sounds almost like an endearment, saccharine and delivered through a feral smile. Our noses brush. For me wanting to knock the living shit out of him, it feels strangely intimate. “don’t know a _goddamn_ thing about me, Jean Kirschtein.”

He doesn’t shove me off, but he also doesn’t yank me forward like what’s happening in the very detailed mental movie rolling in my head, a shaky exhalation hitching up his throat. A second passes, then five, then ten. Almost too quickly to trace, his gaze flicks down to my lips and back up. If anything, my smile grows wider.

He’s running, but I’ve been running my whole life. Jean underestimates how quickly I can catch up.

“I don’t,” he whispers, giving a little shake of his head. “But you don’t know anything about me, either.”

“I know more about you than you know about yourself, kid,” I snort, letting go of his shirt and scooting back an inch or so.

“Don’t call me a--”

“Then stop actin’ like one!” Growling a string of profanity under my breath, I step back with a sharp shove to Jean’s shoulder that makes him bump back against the car again, shuffling across the garage and glaring at everything in my path - the messy workbench, the rusted lockers, the Model T sitting under a tarp in the far corner of the garage. Another spike of irritation hits my veins, and I whip around, pointing at the car’s still silhouette. “And what about this thing?! How long does it take a couple parts to get here from Galveston?! I should be in Chicago right now.”

I must be half-delusional to think that I see the hurt expression skating across his face, gone as quickly as it came. “I, uh… well, there was the dust storm. And some of the parts are on backorder.”

“Ain’t that just fantastic,” I hiss, raking a hand through my hair. “Stuck in West Dallas with no way out. Is this how you feel all the time?”

“I ain’t stuck here,” says Jean, a little defensively. “This is my life. I’m fine with it.”

“You’re a shit liar.”

“And you’re stickin’ your nose in where it don’t belong.”

Shaking my head, I hop up to sit on the workbench, lighting a cigarette and watching him through the rising plume of smoke. “You’re so scared you can’t think straight. You know what’s out there and you know what you want, and you’re too damn scared to go after it.”

“I ain’t scared of nothin’,” Jean bites back, picking up his wrench and focusing on the car again. He can’t look at me when he’s lying.

“Alright,” I shrug. “And how long d’you think you can tell yourself that before it stops working for you?”

 _“It has to work!”_ he half-shouts, something in the depths of the car slamming as he twists hard enough at a bolt to break it. “I’m not like you! I’ve still got my family, I’ve still got people counting on me! If I could get out, I would, but I _can’t._ This is who I am. This is what I get. I get my mom and Nettie and Mikasa and working my ass off in this _fuckin’_ garage, and the only thing that’s gonna happen if I don’t accept that is me going out of my goddamn mind. I had stupid dreams, and they ain’t coming true, not now, not ever.”

I think of his face back in the pawnshop, looking at his trumpet on a shelf a foot above his head like it was sitting at the top of a mountain. “That’s why you have plans instead of dreams.”

“And how are your plans working out for you, Marco?”

I can’t respond to that. Not for the reason he thinks, because of fate being out to get all of us and happiness being a myth or what the hell ever, but because the answer is _‘They were working just fine before I met you.’_

Sighing, I slide off the workbench and walk over to the garage door. “At least I never lied to myself about what my plans were.”

Jean looks over at me and asks, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“What d’you think it means?” I say with a wry smile, grinding my smoke out under my shoe and turning around. “I ain’t gonna spell it out for you, Jean. This is all something you gotta figure out for yourself. I’m gonna take my lunch break. See you later.”

On my way down the street, I stop outside the pawnshop and squint through the gritty window, something clicking in my head when I see the gleam of the trumpet still sitting on the back shelf.

I need to re-formulate my plan. Jean’s been running away.

All I need is something to bring him back.

Sasha is sweeping off her front porch when I walk up the steps, her eyes narrowing dangerously as soon as she catches sight of me. “I thought you were gonna skip town.”

“I had some car trouble,” I tell her breezily, tipping my hat and peering back into the house through the screen door. “Is your husband home?”

“He’s in the kitchen.”

She mutters something under her breath containing the words _no-good lowlife_ as the door shuts behind me, but that’s not the worst verbal abuse I’ve ever gotten from Sasha, so I take it as a typical greeting. Connie’s sitting at the kitchen table with a dog-eared pack of cards playing solitaire, dressed in his Sunday best even though it’s a Thursday afternoon.

“Look at you, all dolled up,” I snort.

Connie’s head snaps up, a wide smile blooming across his face as he hops out of his chair and wraps me in a tight one-armed hug. “Marco, you rat bastard! I thought you was up runnin’ around Chicago with the big boys. The hell’re you doing here?”

“Haven’t left yet,” I shrug. He shoots me a confused look. “Long story. Look, I need your help with something.”

“Woah, woah, woah, you can’t just bust in here after droppin’ off the map for weeks and ask me for help,” says Connie, frowning and stacking his cards up into a neat pile. “Sash said you came in and grabbed your stuff and left like a bat outta hell. Where’d you even go?”

“Again, long story, sort of related to the other long story.”

“I got time.”

Groaning, I slump down into the nearest chair, pinching the bridge of my nose. “You know the mechanic who was gonna fix up that car?”

He blinks. “Eren?”

“No, the other one.”

“Oh, the Kirschtein kid, yeah,” Connie nods, rubbing at the close-cropped hair on the back of his head and looking thoughtful. “Sasha used to do their laundry before they went broke; he came by once or twice to pick it up. Nice guy. Head in the clouds, but nice.”

I don’t say anything.

“So? What about him?” he asks.

Stubborn silence.

Connie lets out an exasperated noise, sitting down and resting his forehead against the table. “Marco, _really_.”

I do a pretty good impersonation of Sasha’s haughty sniff, examining the motor oil under my fingernails. “I ain’t gonna apologize. The heart wants what it wants.”

“More like your cock wants what it wants.”

“It’s not about that.” It’s surprising, how I go from conversational to dead serious in a second flat, hands balling up into fists in my lap. It’s not about that. It’s not. It may have started that way, with my plans to put Texas in my rearview and never look back, with the thought that Jean had pretty eyes and a clever smile and beautiful hands, but it changed.

It changed with me realizing that he was smart and funny, that he was the most stubborn person I’ve ever met in my life and admiring it from across the garage or the dinner table, with me watching him swing Ninette up onto his shoulders even after they ached from working all day and smiling as she laughed. The original plan didn’t involve me seeing Jean as anything other than one more thing to put behind me when I left.

Now, it’s about having him beside me when I do.

“Good God,” Connie gapes after he sees the look on my face, leaning back in his chair and shaking his head. “You _like_ him. You actually _like_ him.”

“You’re sayin’ that like I’m a heartless bastard,” I reply defensively.

“You are a heartless bastard.”

“...Point taken.”

He snickers, picking up the deck to shuffle it and dealing me a hand for poker. It’s an instinctual motion for us, a buffer for when we have to talk about something that actually matters. “Still… I mean, you actually like him? What’re you betting?”

“Is that so hard to believe?” I shrug, peeking at my cards. “I’m bettin’ you doing me the favor I came here to ask.”

“When’s the last time you honestly liked a person you slept with?” Connie deadpans. I glare at him in silence. “Oh, right. Never. So yeah, forgive my skepticism. Raise you folding the laundry out back.”

“You sure you wanna do that?” I smirk.

“I been playing poker with you since we were ten. I know what you look like when you’re bluffing. Show ‘em.” Connie throws his hand down. A pair of queens.

Oh, the irony.

“Bluffing, my ass,” I grin victoriously, flipping my cards over so he can see them. Full house. “And he’s the only reason I ain’t hopped the first train headed North yet. And you just lost your millionth hand of poker, so you’re gonna help me out.”

Connie scrubs a hand down the side of his face. “Do I look like a matchmaker?”

“I don’t need you to do that part of it for me, you goon,” I roll my eyes, shuffling the deck again. “Look, long story short, Jean pawned something a few months back to pay the rent. I want to get it back for him. A gesture of goodwill, y’know?”

“A gesture of ‘get-in-my-pants’ is how it sounds to me,” he mutters, dealing another hand. “Are you tellin’ me you wanna do the pawnshop?”

“I know you wanted to go straight, Connie, but do this for me, man. One more job. Not even the cash. I just wanna get this particular item. Keep myself off the map where the law’s concerned until I can convince him to come with me when I leave.”

Connie breathes out sharply through his nose, staring at his cards. “You’re a damn fool if you think bringing that boy something shiny will make him up and leave his family, Marco. Bet your hat. I like your hat.”

“I fold, you little shit,” I sigh, chucking my inconsequential hand on the table and getting up to look out the window at the dusty street outside. “I’m runnin’ outta options, Connie. I can’t stay here. But I can’t leave, not yet, not until I know damn well that I gave this my best shot.”

A moment passes in silence, and he gets up, walking across the kitchen and putting a hand on my shoulder. “I wish I could help you, brother. I really do.”

I snap my head around to look at him. “But the bet--”

“The bet’s off,” he smiles sadly, looking out the front door where Sasha is still sweeping the porch. “I’m turning myself in as soon as the missus is done cleaning the place up.”

The impact of the words smacks into my chest with all the force of a locomotive, stealing the next words out of my mouth and every scrap of air from my lungs as I stand there and stare at Connie, waiting for him to laugh it off, for this to be some kind of joke. I blink at him owlishly for a few seconds before I finally manage a soft “What?”

“I done nothin’ but hide in this house since we busted out. Can’t go find work, can’t even go out on my own porch without being afraid of some cop swooping down outta the shadows,” Connie shrugs, nodding at the front door. “And I got Sasha to think of. She’s right, y’know? I can’t do anything until I’m right with the law. Runnin’ with you was great, but I can’t do it anymore. Eventually you gotta stop runnin’ and grow up, Marco. We ain’t playin’ Jesse James in your parents’ barn anymore.”

I am surrounded by a sinkhole of abandoned dreams, Jean’s, Connie’s, those of so many nameless people on the streets with weary eyes and weighted shoulders. Everyone here is resigned to what little they can get without taking a risk for it, and now that godawful mentality has finally gotten to the one person I thought would always be right next to me, chasing down the pages of history books in years to come. It’s the worst sort of betrayal, because I don’t even have anyone to blame. Connie wants to take care of his wife. I can’t fault him for that any more than I can fault Jean for wanting to take care of his family.

I look out the window and decide to blame the dust. It gets in the crevices of a person’s life and makes them heavy, anchors them down until it can rise up and swallow them whole. The only reason it hasn’t caught me yet is that I’ve kept moving until now.

That has to be the plan, above everything else. Keep moving. I’ve seen what will happen to me if I don’t.

“You still lost the bet,” I tell him softly, fingers drumming little round prints into the dust coating the windowsill. “So you still gotta help me.”

“I told you--”

“I don’t need you to come with me, Connie,” I snap, blunt nails digging little crescents into the wood beneath them. “I just need your .45 and your word that no one ever hears about this.”

He pauses for a second and sighs. “There’s a Smith and Wesson in the nightstand or a Colt under the loose floorboard on the porch. Take your pick.”

I end up settling for the Smith and Wesson, partly because Sasha’s still out on the porch and partly because I’ve handled that particular gun on jobs before, feel comfortable and familiar with how the weight of it settles in my hand. The bullets get unloaded and stuck into my pocket, the gun itself into the back of my waistband, the borrowed work shirt from the garage baggy enough to conceal it. It’s been months since I’ve gone anywhere packing any sort of heat, and the presence of the cool metal against my spine makes me feel more secure than I ever thought it would.

Connie walks me to the front door, gives me another rib-crushing hug. “All right. Go get your boy his gift. You be careful out there. I’ll be watchin’ the papers.”

“Careful’s overrated.” I try to smirk, but it just comes out as a sad grimace. “Say hi to the boys back in McLennan for me.”

“Sure will,” he snorts, walking out onto the porch and draping an arm around Sasha’s shoulders as I look back at both of them from the street, moving slowly backwards towards the corner. “I’m sure they’d love to get a postcard from Chicago one of these days. Oh, and Marco?”

“Yeah?”

Even from the end of the street, I can see Connie’s big, wolfish grin. “Give ‘em hell.”

“I always do.”

Jean doesn’t ask where I’ve been when I get back from my lunch break twenty minutes late. Of course he doesn’t. He’s trying his best to forget the fact that I’m even here, elbow-deep in an oil change on some dilapidated Ford and focusing intensely on the task in front of him when he hears the door open. My chest aches. But his forced indifference is a little bit of a blessing for me now, because it means he won’t see me walk over to my locker and slip the .45 out of my waistband and under the change of clothes I have stashed in there.

I’ve never dealt well with my existence being invalidated, from _Our son is dead_ all the way up through Jean kissing some girl right in front of me just to prove a point he’s trying to convince himself he doesn’t even have. I feel like something is writhing in the pit of my stomach, but I still manage to whistle along with the big band music playing on the radio as I grab some tools off the workbench and go back to the car I was working on before I left. I’ll deal with Jean pretending I’m not alive the same way I dealt with my parents doing it.

I’ll make myself impossible to ignore.

The garage closes down about two hours before the pawnshop, so I give Jean some excuse about having to run errands in town after we’re done cleaning up that he’s all too happy to take, mumbling and going to his locker.

“Besides,” I say, a little bit of acid in my voice, “Ain’t you got a date tonight?”

“Yeah,” he grunts, grabbing his car keys and heading out through the front room as quickly as he can without actually running.

“Fine,” I growl out to the empty garage after I hear his truck start, changing back into my street clothes and tucking the gun back into my waistband. “Enjoy your fuckin’ date. Vindictive little asshole.”

I say as I’m about to go commit armed robbery for said vindictive little asshole. Perhaps I should re-examine my priorities.

The pawnshop is as packed as ever, even in the evening. Desperation doesn’t have timetables. I can’t do this like I normally would, fire a warning shot into the ceiling and calmly tell everyone to get on the floor. People around here know my face from the garage, and who knows how long I’ll have to stay in West Dallas after I finish this job. Stealth is not only preferable in this case, it’s a necessity. It’s easy enough to disappear back into the maze of shelves, pretending to be shopping and fading into the background. Jean’s trumpet is still sitting in the same spot it’s been for ages. I skirt along the back wall, checking periodically to make sure no one is watching. In all truth, there aren’t even that many people looking at the merchandise, most of them sticking close to the front with the items they came here to pawn. There’s not even anyone in the immediate vicinity to see me when I slip through the ‘Employees Only’ door in the back corner.

It’s nothing more than a small break room and an office, really, but there’s a large cabinet in one corner that’s just big enough for me to fit into, curling in on myself and sitting down as best I can.

And now I wait.

Here in the dark and the quiet, there’s nothing to do but think. I don’t actually own a watch to keep track of the time, and so my mind wanders, flitting back and forth between the past and the future and whatever it is that I’m hovering in now, stuck between the two. I’ve told myself persistently to always look forward, but all I can seem to do lately is stay fixated on what’s long behind me. Telico four years ago always seemed a lifetime away, but the not-so-nameless fear that Jean’s been carrying with him lately has brought it closer. Much closer, I think as my eyelids droop heavily, than I ever wanted it.

Dreams happen in vague sensations for me, which is fortunate, really. It helps me know when I’m asleep. Wakefulness is sharp, vivid. There’s some comfort in the amorphous memories lurking around in my subconscious because some part of me knows that’s all they are - memories. Ghosts.

> _Heat. It’s hot in the alley and hot on the street but you’ve never felt this warm inside not with lips on your neck jaw mouth hands everywhere and you always loved the winter but now you’re starting to see the appeal in burning alive and you don’t remember his name and you sure as hell don’t love him but that’s okay because that’s not what this is about that’s never been what this is about and sometimes you don’t think you were built for love and that it’s just not in your anatomy and you can live with that you really really can as long as the nameless boy with blue eyes and a devil’s smile keeps kissing you like that--_
> 
> _“Marco?”_
> 
> _Fear. The heat is gone and there’s ice in your stomach and the faded pink swish of Maura’s skirt around the corner and oh god oh god this is it it’s all over and you should go after her stop her try to explain but your limbs are lead and the lips on your neck feel like the kiss of death and you can’t move until it’s far too late and you know she’s been home for ages by now and there’s not even a point in going home now but that’s where your feet carry you because even though Telico’s always felt like a hangman’s noose around your neck there’s never been anywhere else for you to go and maybe you’re all wrong about this and Maura stayed quiet and you can pull her aside and fix this after dinner of course you can of course that’s how it is because there’s no other way you can afford for it to be--_
> 
> _Pain. A fist in your jaw before you even get through the door and god all you can do is pray that they had the decency to send Maura up the road to play with the Springers she doesn’t need to see this it wasn’t her fault she’s too young to understand but you know better and that’s all you can hear through the fresh bruises and your mother crying “you know better we raised you better sinful shameful abomination” pain pain pain and bible verses and the crack of fragile ribs and blood and screaming and it takes some time to realize that it’s you and it’s not as if you and your brothers never got the belt when you did something stupid growing up but now it’s the end with the buckle and ten times the force and the way you can feel your shirt and skin tear on each downward stroke is bizarrely fascinating and you focus on the pain so you don’t have to hear the words that hurt so much more--_
> 
> _It stops. Absence._
> 
> _“Get out.” Pain._
> 
> _“You’re supposed to love me. I’m your son.”_
> 
> _“Our son is dead.” Pain. Pain. Pain._
> 
> _You gather what you can amidst fresh blows and head up the road and you do not look back because you know that no one in that house is sad to see you go and the marks of your sins fresh upon your back burn like the hellfire you’ll supposedly be cast into but the further you walk the more the pain lessens to be replaced with something else that was born at “Our son is dead” and will follow you out into the world that has never done you a single favor._
> 
> _Rage._

A thud outside the cabinet jerks me awake with a ragged gasp, and I clap a hand over my mouth too late to stop the sound. My shoulders burn, but it’s from being curled up in the tiny space rather than the pain of wounds that healed a long time ago, and the sick feeling in my stomach is probably more from hunger than anything else. I have no idea of how long I slept, if the shop is closed by now. There’s only the sound of footsteps, of a door opening and closing as someone walks back out into the shop.

Cursing under my breath, I stand and dig the bullets out of my pocket, loading the gun by feel in the dark. Every click feels like another nail hammered in the coffin of a terrible idea, but I’m in a little too deep to back out now, nudging the cabinet door open and moving soundlessly out into the break room. The door out into the shop beyond is slightly ajar, dark and silent. Well, don’t let it be said that luck never cut me a break once in a long while.

I can hear the fat old pawnbroker humming merrily to himself as he moves around the shop, the soft scritch of a pencil on paper. Taking inventory. It’ll take clever timing, but if I wait behind the back shelf, stay there until he moves out of sight of the front window…

Ten seconds later I’ve got a cold circle of steel leveled against the back of his skull, voice perfectly calm as I pull back the hammer with a metallic click. “Don’t turn around unless you’d like an extra hole in your head. Cooperate and this’ll be real easy.”

“Oh God. Oh God, the safe’s in the back, I--”

“I don’t want the safe,” I roll my eyes, poking the back of his head a little harder. “Please remain calm and try not to piss yourself. I’m more interested in that sharp little Martin trumpet you got on the top shelf over there.”

“Take it, take it,” the pawnbroker practically sobs, wringing his hands and flailing side to side.

“Don’t turn around!” I snap, steering him down the aisle with the gun barrel and stopping in front of the shelf with the trumpet. “Alright, take it down and pass it back, nice and slow.”

I can see the smudges of sweaty fingerprints on the trumpet’s gleaming surface when he hands it back, and I frown, rubbing it off on my shirt with my free hand. “Got a case for this thing?”

“U-up front, the counter…”

“Okay, okay, settle down.” I really hate it when they blubber. Grumbling, I steer him back through the back room and into the office, stopping him at the desk. “Now here’s what’s gonna happen. You’re gonna stand there and stare at that corner for the next hour, and then you’re gonna call the cops or whatever it is you’re plannin’ to do after this whole affair is over. Then you’re gonna go home, make a nice calming cup of chamomile tea, and go about your life. Understood?”

More blubbering. Christ.

After he’s safely shut up in the office, I book it back to the front, digging the trumpet case out from under the counter and packing it away as carefully as I can while still moving quickly, taking fleeting glances out the front window every few seconds. The quicker I get out of here, the better off I’ll be.

The register’s open. Damn it all.

I go ahead and clean that out, too, if for no other reason than that I feel like I owe Mrs. Kirschtein some rent money for feeding and boarding me for weeks and that maybe if I hand Eren cash for the car repairs he won’t be such a prick to me all the time, stuffing stacks of bills down the bell of the trumpet and fumbling with the latches on the case.

When the pawnbroker undoubtedly files a police report, the first thing they’re going to do is look to see who pawned the stolen trumpet. I have the chance to nip that trail in the bud right now. The counter is piled high with record books, so I just grab the first one that looks likely, a label on the spine that reads “April.” Jean said he pawned the trumpet a few months ago.

And towards the end of the book, there it is, a hasty write-up on the trumpet with Jean’s messy signature across the bottom. I yank the page out and wad it up, jamming it in my pocket before grabbing the trumpet and sprinting out the front door.

The walk down the dusty road back to the Kirschteins’ is long and taxing on my aching body, but every few steps I look down at the case in my hand and feel a gratified smirk work its way onto my lips.

First job in four months. No shots fired, goal achieved, and a little extra cash to boot.

Yeah, I still got it.

 


	8. Jean

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a fair warning, there's some homophobic language used later in the chapter.

“You’re late,” Mom says the second I walk through the door, and I don’t try to argue, because I know it’s true. A quick grocery run turned into a two-hour-long affair, starting with the nearest market not having the right kind of sugar and ending with the engine in my truck threatening to sputter out on the way home, with a whole ocean of shit in-between.

“I know, I know, I’m sorry,” I rush out, juggling an armful of paper bags and kicking the front door shut behind me, slumping into the kitchen and dropping everything on the table. “It was a zoo in town. I got back as fast as I could.”

“Well, you got back as fast as you could, and I’ve now got less than an hour to get this cake finished,” she sighs, digging through the bags. “What kept you?”

“They didn’t have powdered sugar at the general store, so I had to go into West Dallas, got stuck in a traffic jam.”

“Wha ‘bout hraffic ham?” Marco walks into the kitchen with a mixing bowl and a wooden spoon in hand, licking cake batter off the end. I make a very valiant effort to focus on the pattern of the dust swirling outside the window. Grinning, he chucks the bowl and spoon into the sink and hops up on the counter, handing Mom the stick of butter she’s reaching for. “Mrs. Kirschtein, ma’am, that cake ain’t even out of the oven yet and if the batter’s any indicator it’s still the best I’ve ever had.”

“Someone wants a bigger piece,” she laughs, throwing ingredients for icing into another bowl and turning around to look at me. “Jean? Traffic jam?”

“Uh, yeah.” Shaking my head slightly, I sit down at the table and start unpacking the rest of the groceries. “Backed up all the way out to the main road. Couldn’t get down the street in front of the garage. Something was going on at the pawnshop, I think. I saw a police car.”

Marco looks up from the counter and says, “Huh.”

“Huh?” I ask.

“Huh.”

“Where’s Nettie?” Better to change the subject. Marco’s got kind of a strange look on his face, and it’s been a rough enough day already without dealing with whatever it’s masking.

“Up the road at the Zerumskis’,” Mom huffs, dumping some of the powdered sugar in with the rest of the icing stuff and whisking it until it thickens. “They’re sending her back at eight, by which time I’m supposed to have this cake iced and dinner made, neither of which are done.”

“I can do the cake,” Marco pipes up, shrugging from his spot on the counter.

Mom shoots him a sidelong glance. “You can?”

“Seven kids is a lot of birthdays, ma’am. Reckon I’ve seen my mother ice enough cakes to do one myself.”

“You’re an angel,” she sighs, standing on tiptoe to ruffle his hair and handing him the icing bowl. “Just get one of the bigger butter knives out of the drawer; I’ll start making the dumplings. Jean!”

“Huh?” I jump, looking back and forth between them.

Mom snaps her fingers, looking exasperated. “Don’t just sit there like a bump on a log! Help!”

“I, uh… okay?” I burn toast on a good day, but I’ve got more of a sense of self-preservation than to ask what the hell I’m supposed to do. “I’ll just, um…”

“Get the cake out of the oven, sweetie.”

“Cake out of the oven. Got it.” I can’t tell if it’s me being generally out of my element or the shit-eating smirk Marco’s shooting me from the counter, but I feel off-balance as I get up and reach for the oven door.

“Oven mitts, Jean!”

“Oh, right, shit--”

“Language!”

 _“Shoot,”_ I correct myself hastily, pulling on a worn pair of oven mitts and sliding the pan of Ninette’s favorite chocolate cake out of the oven. There are two overtime shifts in that pan, milk and eggs and white flour something we’ve only seen once or twice in the past two years. Sixteen hours of motor oil and Eren’s bitching in one tiny pan. I walk back over to the table like I’m holding a bomb.

“Never seen a man look so terrified of baked goods in my life,” Marco snorts, grabbing the pan out of my hands and flipping it over to dump the cake onto a big, chipped plate.

“You’re gonna burn the shi… livin’ daylights outta your hands.” By the time I manage to catch the almost-curse and tell him that, he’s already sitting back down and swiping up a little bit of icing on his finger.

“Calluses,” he shrugs, flashing work-worn palms in my direction and licking the icing off his finger with a grin. “Ninette’s lucky. I can’t remember the last time I had birthday cake.”

“Says the guy that just offered to ice one.” Shaking my head, I get up and start putting the rest of the groceries away. “Are you a farmer, a mechanic, _and_ a baker now?”

“I’m a man of many talents,” he hums, watching me over the rim of the icing bowl, and that should _not_ send a shiver down my spine.

I practically trip over myself in my haste to go help Mom with the dumplings.

This should have been _fixed_ by now, dammit. I’ve taken steps to fix this, set myself on the right path and taken steps down it. I went out with Mikasa _last night_ , for God’s sake, had a good time, went to the movies and drove her home and kissed her on her front porch before she went inside. I was content. And all it takes to throw me off is Marco making some loaded comments and eating icing.

I’m weak. I’m so fucking weak.

The anger at myself gets taken out on a massive wad of dough that Mom puts me to work kneading, which really ends up more like pummelling, but as long as the job gets done, I don’t think she cares.

An uncomfortable silence fills the kitchen, broken by me beating the shit out of the poor innocent dumplings and the slow bubble of the chicken broth boiling on the stove. Marco keeps watching me with that infuriating little smirk as he pulls the cake across the table and starts spreading icing around the top. I grit my teeth until my jaw aches and swear to myself I’m going to stop looking at him in five seconds, maybe ten. Mom starts cutting up chicken breasts, completely oblivious.

A scuffle floats through the cracked-open window, followed by a tiny voice choking on a sob.

“What’s that?” Marco asks from the table.

It takes a while to see through the dust when I squint out the window, but I eventually make out a tattered dress and blonde pigtails and a wiry little body hunched against the oppressive heat. “It’s Ninette. Didn’t you say she wouldn’t be back for an hour, Mom? It looks like - ah, yup, blood on her face, great.”

“I got her.” In a split second, Marco’s icing knife is clattering on the table and he’s on his feet, shoving his chair under the table.

For whatever reason, a little bloom of anger lights up in my chest, some sort of self-righteous indignation in me screaming that how _dare_ he make himself an integral part of my life, so close and so familiar that his first instincts are the same as mine. Dusting flour off my hands, I turn to beat him to the door, snapping, “She’s _my_ sister.”

 _“I got her.”_ The rest of my argument is lost in the slam of the screen door.

“Did it look bad?” Mom asks, her face drawn as she tries to peer out the window.

“She’s come home with worse.”

But any consolation that might have given goes flying into thin air when Marco nudges the door back open with his hip, carrying in Nettie, who’s positively _wailing_ into his neck. Frowning, he sits her down on the sunken couch in the living room, inspecting the damage. It’s nothing terrible, a split lip that’s bleeding pretty freely and a torn dress and a few scrapes. I know better than to think she’s crying out in pain. I watched her get a broken arm set with nothing more than a whimper. Ninette only cries like that when she’s absolutely _livid_.

“Woah there, little darlin’, deep breaths,” he says in a soothing hum, petting down the flyaway hair that’s escaped from her braids and leaning down to get a closer look at whatever she’s done to her lip. “What happened?”

“I w-was up the road p-playin’ baseball with the boys, and Tom Wagner started runnin’ his _big fat mouth_ again, and I…”

“Ninette, what have I told you about fightin’?” I groan, abandoning the dumplings in favor of going into the living room and kneeling next to Marco, tracing the red stain of an impending bruise along her cheekbone with my thumb but pulling back when she winces. “Some of them boys are twice your size, kiddo. Forget ladylike or not, you’re gonna get yourself really hurt.”

“He hit me first,” she hisses indignantly, crossing bony arms tightly across her chest and glaring at me like I’m the bad guy for talking any sort of sense. No wonder she and Marco get along so well. “Pushed me into the big fence we used to mark the outfield and busted my lip.”

“So you ran home?” I ask, standing up to go get gauze and iodine out of the bathroom.

“No, so I beat the _snot_ outta him. Reckon I broke his nose. I heard somethin’ crunch, anyway.”

 _“Ninette!”_ Mom gasps from the kitchen.

“And I ain’t sorry!”

By the time I get back, Marco’s got her calmed down to a mutinous glare and the occasional sniffle, grumbling to herself on the couch. He takes a quick look into the kitchen to make sure Mom’s not watching before he leans forward, an impish smile quirking at his lips. “Did he beg for mercy?”

Ninette smirks. “Twice.”

“Attagirl,” he whispers, ruffling her hair, and she giggles. But the levity is over once I pour some iodine left over from the incident with Marco’s infected cut onto a clean handkerchief and press it to the red furrow down the center of her bottom lip.

“Ow!”

“I know, Nettie, but we gotta keep it clean,” I mutter, dabbing at it a few more times and trying to chase her around as she squirms out of my reach. “Some birthday, huh?”

“Long as there’s cake, I’m fine,” she shrugs.

“There’s cake. I just watched your big brother pull it out of the oven,” Marco nods, hopping back up and walking over to the hallway. “And there are presents, too.”

Ninette perks up in a second flat. “Presents?”

“Oh yeah. You’re gonna blow a gasket when you see what Jean got you.”

“What is it what is it whatisit?!” Her injuries seemingly forgotten, she launches off the couch and practically climbs me, tiny hands knotting up in the fabric of my shirt. “Jean, what’d you get me?!”

“A doll,” I say gravely, and her face falls. While there’s a part of me that’s a little bitter over Marco being right in terms of birthday present selections, I still manage a laugh, peeling her off of me and plopping her back on the couch. “Nah, I’m kidding. Mom, is it okay if I go ahead and give Nettie her present?”

“Fine by me. Dinner won’t be ready for a while anyways.”

“All right, kiddo, wait there,” I grin, jogging over to the linen closet in the hallway where a recycled paper grocery bag with the ball and mitt inside is hidden on the top shelf. While I’m making the long stretch to get it, Marco walks back down the hall from my room with a Cheshire Cat smile and something hidden behind his back. “What’s that?”

“Miss Ninette’s birthday present, ‘course,” he says, sidestepping down the hall so neither of us can see what he’s got. “All right, little darlin’, you ever seen one of these?”

In his hands is the ukulele he smuggled out of the pawnshop, the previously worn wood varnished to a gleam. I still remember him wandering through the aisles, fingers flitting over the strings, the cavalier shrug when he pulled it out in the car like some sort of trophy for a game that no one else was playing. I thought he’d taken it for himself, dismissed the action as childish and reckless and textbook Marco, really.

I feel like someone just sucker-punched me.

“Wow, neat!” Nettie half-whispers, taking it from him with careful hands and poking at the fretboard. “I don’t know how to play any instruments or nothin’, though.”

“Which is why my other present is free ukulele lessons,” Marco laughs, flopping down on the couch next to her and turning the instrument over so that his fingers are pressed to the neck. “Now you just strum right there, Miss Ninette, nice even beat, one-two-three-four.”

Her dirt-smudged fingers follow the beat he’s counting out, a little frown of concentration tugging inward at her features. “Like that?”

“Attagirl.”

Ninette keeps up the rhythm, and Marco changes the chords as she plays, a slow blues progression that sounds like lazy heat and long afternoons. “Why, look at that, you’re already an expert. _Summertime, and the livin’ is easy…_ ”

This is why. This is why I can’t just take the life I crafted for myself and be content with it. I keep trying to write Marco off as a lapse of judgment, as something that’s not good for me and mine, and he just keeps proving me wrong at every turn, the bastard. I can’t remember the last time I saw my mother smile so often or easily, the last time I saw my sister comfortable in her own skin. He was supposed to come and go and take the last bothersome scraps of my unachievable dreams with him.

Instead, he stayed, and he changed something. I still don’t know what it is, but the one certainty I have is that I’m the only one here who’s been affected for the worse, the only one who feels like a wreck when they look at him.

This is what Marco does. He takes things that are supposed to be simple and complicates them until you can’t tell which way is up or what direction your heart is tugging you.

The two of them finish up the song, and Nettie smiles so wide it looks like her face is about to split in two, grabbing the ukulele in one hand and throwing her arms around Marco’s waist. “Thanks, Marco! You gotta teach me more after dinner, okay?”

“You got it, little darlin’.”

“Well now you’re just makin’ me look bad,” I scoff, setting the paper bag on Ninette’s lap and crossing my arms. “Happy birthday, Nettie. This one comes with lessons, too.”

“You swear it ain’t a doll?” she mumbles, eyeing me incredulously from the couch. “You cross your heart?”

“Why don’t you open it and see, silly goose?”

Still looking nervous, she unrolls the top of the bag and pulls the paper apart, squinting inside. She stills for a second, a twitch of confusion across her face that’s replaced with surprise, then awe, and then the brightest grin I’ve ever seen. “Wow. _Wow!_ ”

“Told you it wasn’t a doll,” I shrug as she yanks the ball and mitt out of the bag, holding it in her hands like some holy relic. Anything else I was about to say gets crushed from my lungs in the wake of her flying at me, hugging me so tight that I think I might bruise.

“Thanks, Jean,” she whispers, and I could swear her voice wobbles a little bit, but it’s hard to tell with her face hidden in my shirt. “This is… this is swell.”

“Look at you. I usually gotta bribe you for a hug.” That’s all it takes for her to let go, stalking back to the couch and grumbling something about ‘sissy stuff’ under her breath.

“You wanna practice that ukulele for a minute?” says Marco, and Ninette nods eagerly, grabbing for it again. “All right, you just play around with the chords and see if you can match up to what’s playin’ on the radio. I’ll be back to check on you in a few minutes. Jean, can I talk to you for a second?”

No. No, you can’t. I’m confused enough without you digging further under my skin and planting roots there. I haven’t seen anything grow in West Dallas in years, and it’s hard enough to walk around a dead town without feeling like there are vines growing in my ribs and flowers sprouting beneath my sternum. So no, you can’t talk to me for a second. I’m the only one here who’s even bothering to try to hold it together around you.

“Yeah, sure.”

I’m so fucking weak.

He waves me back the hallway towards my room, shuts the door with a grin, and I get the sudden sensation of what Daniel must have felt like in the lions’ den. I don’t think praying will do me much good, though. Daniel never had a part of him that wanted the lions to eat him alive.

“I actually got something for you, too,” Marco smiles, yanking open the bottom drawer of my dresser and digging around through the messy wads of clothes inside.

“It ain’t my birthday,” I tell him curtly, wanting to shut this down as soon as possible, go back to the careful distance I’ve kept while I can still maintain it.

“Call it a peace offering, then,” he counters, eyes rolling up towards the ceiling. “You… you been acting different lately, and I’m not sure if it’s something I’ve done, so…”

God, does he not know? Does he really not know what a mess I’ve been, the role he plays in that? What kind of force of destruction is he that he can rip me apart at the seams and never even notice?

I’d know the case anywhere. I’d know it in the dark walking home from concerts that ended late, in the afternoon sunlight on the way home from school, in the slanted twilight through my window when Marco pulls it out of my dresser drawer and sets it down unceremoniously on my bed.

“Oh God,” I whisper, fingers hovering an inch over the clasps. “Oh God.”

“Go on and open it.” His voice is far more even than mine.

“The cop cars at the pawnshop.” It’s more of a breath than real words, cold metal pressed to worn fingertips and some invisible weight pressed against my chest. “It was you.”

“You were on your date. Had to do something to entertain myself.”

Something snaps, and I round on him, eyes narrowing and fists balling up at my sides. “You _idiot!_ You brought stolen goods into my house! Where d’you think the first place they’re gonna look is, Marco, What do you think--”

He pulls a scrap of paper out of his breast pocket, throws it down on top of the case. A pawn slip. My signature at the bottom. “I am nothing if not a professional, Jean Kirschtein. The place does business out the wazoo. That pawnbroker don’t know you from Adam, and without this, they got no trail. Now do yourself a favor for once and open the damn case.”

Shaking almost too hard to do it, I manage to flip the clasps open, the case creaking on its hinges when I flip the lid back. There it is. Perfect condition, not so much as a dent or scratch, mother-of-pearl caps on the valves shining iridescent in the setting sun. My hands ache for it.

Marco nods down at the trumpet and says, “Go on.”

The weight of the instrument in my hands feels like coming home, fingers slipping into the slides and resting gently atop the valves, pressing down lightly to test them. Still oiled. I could play a concert right now.

“You could probably play something without them hearing you. Ninette’s got the radio up pretty loud.”

“Don’t matter,” I shrug, picking up the mouthpiece and fitting it into place. “I never told Mom I pawned the thing. She thinks I just stopped playing.”

Marco goes silent for a long time, and finally says, “You’re something else.”

“Look who’s talkin’, holding up a pawnshop for a peace offering.”

“Play me something,” he laughs, leaning against the door and watching me. If I didn’t know better, I would say I was transparent, everything in me on display.

My fingers stutter, the first thing they remember a Sousa march we played in school. I’m out of practice. My lips hurt after a few measures and some of the high notes crack, but I couldn’t care less. It’s the gratification after the pain that matters, the ache in your muscles after you win a race, the blisters on your hands after doing a full transmission change in twenty minutes flat.

The burn in your veins after a boy with hazel eyes and big plans looks at you for a little too long and you’re still strong enough to turn away.

“That was good,” Marco says from the doorway after I’m done, arms crossed over his chest and an almost-smile tucked into the curve of his mouth.

“That was shit,” I shake my head, setting the trumpet down carefully on top of the bedspread and flexing my hands. “I need practice.”

“So practice.”

“Why?” The sharpness in the word takes us both by surprise, cutting the air like a blade as I whip around to look at him. “Why would you go to all that trouble for a stupid trumpet? Why would you risk gettin’ caught for me?”

“I think you know the answer to that, Jean,” he sighs.

“God, shut up,” I groan, running a hand through my hair and tugging hard in some subconscious attempt to wake myself up. “Just shut up with this cryptic ‘you know the answer’ bullshit, okay? Tell me why.”

“Because you ain’t got plans that someone else didn’t make for you, and you slapped a pawn slip on your dreams,” Marco shrugs, and this would all be so much easier if the smile he gives me didn’t look so sad and patronizing.”That, and you look handsome as all hell playin’ that thing.”

“Don’t.” My voice breaks.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t… don’t say shit like that. Just… _don’t_.” This is what planes in freefall feel like, this is the last desperate radio call from a ship as it sinks, this is a car speeding out of control.

Marco raises an eyebrow and pushes himself off the doorframe, sidling over to me with a sort of bowlegged gait. I’ve noticed it before. Probably from him riding horses all the time growing up. I noticed. I told myself I didn’t. He stops a foot in front of me, still staring at me evenly, unflappable. “Why not?”

“Because it sounds…” I start, making pointless gestures once my words fail me.

“It sounds?”

“It sounds sorta queer!” I rush out, throat clamping down on the words and making them come out a half octave too high. There it is.

Mayday, mayday. S.O.S. E-brake.

Marco blinks at me for a moment, and then bursts out laughing.

He laughs so hard that his knees give out from under him, sinking to the floor and pounding a fist against the worn wood. I stand there like a statue, wide-eyed and confused. He calms down enough to take one look up at me before he starts howling again, cackling for all he’s worth, and when he finally gets to his feet, he’s wiping tears of mirth from the corners of his eyes.

“Darlin’,” he wheezes, leaning forward and catching his breath, “I am queerer than a three-dollar bill. The fact of the matter here is that if you weren’t, you would’ve run screamin’ into the night a hell of a long time before now.”

I can’t move. I can’t respond. My whole body is a tripped circuit, faint sparks along my wires that fizzle out before I can form anything coherent. It takes Marco another long moment to stop laughing, the levity dropping from his face when he sees the look on mine. I can’t move. I can’t respond. This is it. My plane is down, my ship has sunk, my car has slammed into a wall.

Crash. Bang. Smoke.

“Jean.” A whisper, soft as the fingertips that skitter over over the hinge of my jaw.

Crash.

“Jean.”

Bang.

“Look at me.”

Smoke.

“Say something.”

“I don’t need this,” I finally manage to croak, quivering from head to toe.

Marco frowns, letting his hand drop. “What?”

“I. Don’t. Need. This.” Clenched teeth, sweaty palms, all the effort I’ve got in me gone to making it sound true. “I was _fine_ before you got here. I was fine, and then you had to show up. I’ve been fightin’ this my whole life, Marco, and I don’t need this.”

“You got any idea how sad that sounds?” he snaps back in a sharp whisper, his eyes hardening. “I’ll go ahead and save you the trouble and tell you that this is a fight you’re gonna lose, Jean, because trust me, I’ve _been there._ Tellin’ the truth to go away don’t make it a lie.”

“I was _fine_!” It comes out as half a sob, which doesn’t help my case, but it seems like all I can do is repeat it on loop, accusation sitting thick across every consonant. “This is what I have, and I was fine with it. I have Mom and Ninette, I have _Mikasa_ \--”

“Tell me you love her,” he says, interrupting me.

The words get stuck in my throat. “I…”

“Tell me you’ve loved that girl since the day you met her, that you’re crazy about her. That you’re happy. Tell me that, Jean, and I swear I’ll back off.” I try. I try with everything I’ve got in me, but it’s impossible to say anything with Marco this close, eyes blazing and jaw clenched tight as he repeats himself through gritted teeth. “Do you love her?”

“I…” Lying isn’t an option. I’ve tried lying to him I don’t know how many times, and he’s caught me in every single one. There’s no way I can look him in the eye and blatantly ignore the truth, so I settle for skirting around it. “I think if I tried…”

“God, _listen_ to yourself!” Marco laughs coldly, turning away and shaking his head. The sick feeling in my stomach gets even worse when he walks away from me, and it takes me a moment to stop myself from following, a step forward and a hand half-extended towards him. He whips back around before he reaches the door, one look at me all it takes to make his expression shift from anger to something caught between pity and disgust. “If you _tried_?!”

“What other choice do I have?” I choke out, feeling like something is trying to claw its way out of my chest.

“You got the choice to stop going through your life like it’s a goddamn movie scene and _live_ ,” he hisses, slamming his hand down on top of my dresser so hard that the whole room rattles. “There ain’t no point in loving someone if you gotta try to love them.”

Is there any point in any of this? Everything I’ve done has been so careful and so scripted for so long that nothing feels real anymore. The only thing that does is standing five feet away from me that might as well be a thousand miles.

“Is that what you want? The rest of your days wasting away in this shithole and trying to love a woman who can’t stop this life from killing you any more than you can?” He moves back to me in two long strides, palms warm and steady as they settle on either side of my face. This would all be easier if Marco could just go back to being angry instead of looking so sad, like he’s watching me slip away even as the callused pads of his thumbs ghost across my cheekbones. “And it will. All this denial, all this lying to yourself, Jean, it’s gonna _kill you._ You’ll be walkin’ around and going to work and getting married and making babies, and you’ll spend the rest of your life fuckin’ _dead_.”

I can romanticize it all I want, a life that's nothing but an endless loop of the last two years, but Marco has the truth of it, can see the hollowness that's been slowly blooming under my skin for God knows how long. A life of working double shifts just to watch Ninette outgrow secondhand dresses, a worn-out picket fence with Mikasa, being a good son and a good brother and a good lover, it's supposed to make me content if not happy. All I've been feeling for ages is tired. Bone-deep tired and hopeless, and then along came this rough-and-tumble boy on a cloud of dust with a smile like the edge of a knife but a tongue like honey and promises that I could go all the way to the moon if I just took his hand.

I've always dreamed of leaving, but I've always planned to stay. It's not so much a conflict of interests as it is a war between the person I am and the person I'm supposed to be. Marco has left no doubts as to whose side he's on, but I'm trapped in no-man's land, staring at my family and Mikasa and the life I've been raised to think will make me happy in the trenches on one side while the gunfire from Marco and the truth on the other grows louder and louder in my ears. What am I supposed to believe? What am I supposed to choose? And most importantly...

“What do you want from me?” I whisper, feeling like I’m being pulled apart.

The anger comes back in a second flat.

 _“I wanna help you get out!”_ His grip tightens, fingertips pressing hard against the back of my skull for a moment before he lets out a shuddering breath, leaning down and resting his forehead against mine. “Because I don’t have to fuckin’ _try_ to feel what I feel for you. It’d be easier if I didn’t. What I _want_ is for you to stop being so scared of your own happiness.”

How can I be scared of something I’d resigned myself to never have? The fact that I don’t stop my hands from unclenching and coming up to rest against Marco’s chest is more terrifying than any shot at happiness I’ve ever had, the fact that I’ve lost the ability to keep my distance scarier than the idea of a life lived on a script.

His breath moves over my lips in a warm wash, eyes fluttering shut as his face knots up into a concentrated frown, focused on holding something back. “Tell me not to do this, Jean.”

I can’t.

“Just tell me to back off, and I will. Tell me you don’t want this.”

I can’t, I can’t…

“I can’t.”

Marco lets out a tired, humorless huff of a laugh. “Why not?”

“Because you told me to never bullshit a bullshitter.” The battle was over before it ever even started. He gives me that Cheshire Cat smile, and I am lost again.

_‘In another moment down went Alice into the rabbit-hole, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.’_

His lips are on mine, and everything implodes. This isn’t kissing Mikasa to prove something to myself in a dusty broom closet, isn’t pleasant warmth and mild contentment. It’s explosions and the world falling out from beneath my feet and being torn apart all the way down to the substructure of my soul and _fire_ , licking along the linings of my veins. I read something about phoenixes once, how they have to rise from ashes, and I decide in the moment that I yank him closer by his shirt collar and kiss him back that I don’t really mind letting him burn me alive. Maybe the person who walks away from this will be different. Better.

Braver.

It’s messy and ungraceful, both of us colliding in a trainwreck that’s been coming for weeks now. My balance falters and in the space of a second we’ve somehow ended up against the wall beside my dresser with a dull thud that aches in my shoulderblades and resonates through my whole body, Marco’s hands sliding from my face to my neck to the curve of my shoulders, holding me in place. Fire, fire, white-hot shocks of electricity wherever his skin touches mine, scorching the lining of my lungs when I gasp out a breath against his mouth and he laughs, nipping hard at my bottom lip and pulling a stuttered groan from the center of my chest.

“God, you’re so responsive, fuck,” he whispers, something almost like awe in his voice when he trails kisses up the side of my neck and I practically arch off the wall, fingers pressing into the spaces between his ribs in some futile effort to give myself an anchor. Am I really? I’m in unfamiliar territory, drowning in uncharted waters, and the best hope I can give myself is to lace shaking fingers through Marco’s hair and tug his lips back to mine.

For all the danger he carries around with him, his arms locked securely around me are the first place I’ve felt safe in two years.

A sharp clatter rises up outside my door, Ninette laughing as she runs down the hallway, and whatever heated haze it is that’s been fogging up my brain shatters. Marco jumps a little in time with me pulling back, our mouths disconnecting with a definitive, wet _pop_ that seems too sharp for the heavy air around it.

“Goddamn,” he whispers, brushing his fingertips pensively across his lips before a wide smile blooms there and he shakes his head, taking a small step back. “You’re a hell of a kisser for not having much practice, Jean Kirschtein.”

“I am?” I ask before I realize how stupid that sounds, sputtering and slapping on an utterly fake air of confidence as I look up at him. “I mean, uh. Yeah. Must be a natural.”

Ninette runs back down the hall, her voice and footsteps fading, and Marco snickers, leaning back towards me and ghosting smirking lips along the shell of my ear. "Must be."

A shudder runs outward across my limbs, eyes heavy-lidded and chest tight. I'm still falling, so far and so fast that there's a small place in me that's terrified of what will happen when I hit the bottom, of the reality I've just jumped into slamming into me at a hundred miles an hour, crushing my bones and liquefying my insides. But there's more of me that's mistaking falling for flying, a breathy little laugh clinging to my lips and seeking fingers climbing up the column of his spine, mapping out scars and vertebrae under the thin fabric of his shirt. "You gonna stand there talkin' about it or are you gonna kiss me again?"

“Talk about a change of heart,” he snorts, kissing me softer and slower this time.

“You complaining?”

“ _Hell_ no.”

He tastes like cigarette smoke and dust and bold promises, the press of his lips insistent in synchronization with guiding hands settling on my hips and pushing me backwards until the backs of my knees collide with the edge of my bed, my balance teetering and heart climbing into my throat.

“W-wait,” I choke out, throwing my arms around Marco’s neck to keep myself upright.

He pulls back, hazel eyes flashing molten gold in the twilight seeping in around the curtains as he frowns, brushing messy hair out of my face. “You okay? Too fast?”

“No, it’s just.” Stammering, I jerk my head back at the bed behind me, the flash of metal still on top of the blankets. “The trumpet.”

“Oh, for the love of…” Marco rolls his eyes, letting go of me long enough to grab the trumpet off the top of my faded quilt and plunk it down on the bedside table.

“Hey, no!” I squawk, shoving past him and snatching it up, cradling it my arms like a newborn. “You can’t put it down like that; you’ll damage the bell!”

“Oh, forgive me for not knowing the finer points of trumpet care,” he scoffs, sitting on the edge of the bed and watching as I walk across the room to place it carefully back in its case, brushing my fingers reverently over the polished surface before closing the lid and latching it shut. The corner of Marco’s mouth twitches upwards. “You’re a hell of a kisser, and if you touch anything else the way you touch that thing then I’d be willing to bet you’re a hell of a lover.”

“Jesus,” I hiss, feeling my cheeks flush.

“No need for formality; you can call me Marco.” I scoop a dirty shirt off the floor and fling it at him. He catches it one-handed, reaching forward with the other and hooking a finger through one of the belt loops on my jeans to tug me closer. “C’mon, darlin’, don’t be mad. Didnt mean to insinuate that you have a romantic relationship with your trumpet.”

A flash of heat crosses my body and sinks into a glowing coal in the center of my chest, and I am such a fool for letting a sly smile and _c’mon, darlin’_  light me up from the inside. I am such a fool for letting Marco work his way under my skin and anchor himself there, for letting him go at the little box of secrets I’d so carefully maintained with a sledgehammer and the determination to make me see things as they are, for letting him kiss me and put a nail in the coffin at any hope of contentment in a world without him.

I am such a fool for him. A small, anxious voice in the back of my head whispers that it will be the end of me one day.

My hands are shaking again. I still them by leaning down and kissing him, letting him pull me back into his gravity like a helpless moon. The memory surfaces again of when I was little, skirting my hands over candle flames and seeing how long it took to get burned. I feel his skin searing under my fingertips, and I want to still them there, don’t care if I end up all burn scars and ashes. If he’s going to be the end of me, then going down in flames is better than burning out.

“This just made everything harder, didn’t it?” I whisper, resting my forehead against his with a heavy sigh.

“I think it makes it easier,” Marco shrugs, swiping the pad of his thumb along the hinge of my jaw and smiling softly. “At least you’re being honest with yourself now.”

“Yeah. Feels weird.”

“Jean!” Mom’s voice is muffled through the door, distant, shouted from the end of the hall. “Get out here! Your sister wants you and Marco to help her break in that baseball mitt.”

“Coming!” I yell back, stepping back from Marco and feeling like a part of me has been severed when I do. The trumpet case gets picked up with careful hands and stashed under my bed. Something to remind me of the person I am, to hold onto when the person I’m supposed to be tries to pull me back.

“I’ll go and help her get it put on,” says Marco from the doorway, hands in his pockets as he looks fondly out into the hallway, where I can hear Ninette yelling something about the Reebs boys being jealous enough to spit when they see her new mitt. “Come on out when you’re ready.”

I press my hands against the surface of the case, and when I look up, he’s gone. The first time I met him, I could see his smile for hours after he left. Maybe it’s all in my head, but standing in the stillness of my room as the sun sinks down in a cloud of dust outside, I can still feel his kiss long after he’s out of sight.


	9. Marco

I like to think of myself as a reasonably tolerant person. I don’t get angry without probable cause, I’m friendly to people who are friendly to me, and I try to give people the benefit of the doubt when they aren’t. As a rule, I’d say I’m a nice guy, so long as you’re willing to ignore the whole “convicted felon” aspect. I’m pretty easy to get along with.

That said, I really, _really_ don’t like Eren Jaeger.

He’s loud and brash, which I could deal with on its own. I grew up with Connie, after all. It’s more to do with him banging around the garage like everything he touches has somehow personally wronged him, pointlessly angry at everything. I think I’ve seen the guy in a good mood maybe twice. Jean always waves it off, says that anyone would be chronically pissed if they had to deal with a business running in the red during the day only to go home at night and listen to hours of lectures about why they should have gone to medical school. It’s hard for me to feel sympathy for someone when I’m biting back the urge to deck them.

“Might as well put you on the permanent payroll,” Eren snaps as he stalks past the truck I’m working on to go grab something off the workbench. Jean usually tells him to back off whenever he starts down that road, but he’s up front taking care of a customer at the moment, and Eren’s obviously in the mood for picking a fight. “You been hanging around for what, a month?”

“Three weeks, one of which I spent laid up because of an injury,” I reply as mildly as I can. I’ve seen Jean foolishly rise to Eren’s jabs enough times to know that it’s like poking a cougar with a stick, and it’s too goddamn hot to even think about anything other than finishing this oil change so I can go on my lunch break. “And you ain’t paid me one red cent since I been here, not that I’m complaining, because that was the agreement I made. Said I’d work here to pay off the repairs until my car was fixed. However, it begs the question, what kinda business are you runnin’ that takes three weeks to fix the transmission in a Model T?”

“You can talk to Jean about that. I never signed off on him dragging the car in here. Sure as hell never signed off on having a mouthy indentured servant for three weeks. This is Jean’s mess, and that car’ll get fixed when Jean fixes it. I ain’t touchin’ the damn thing.”

“Fine,” I shrug, slamming the hood down and shooting him a glare.

“Fine.”

 _“Fine.”_ Bristling, I wipe the motor oil smeared over my hands off on the towel hanging from my belt loop, tossing the fabric down on the workbench as I pass. “I’m headed to lunch.”

Eren snorts in recognition, pointing his wrench at me accusingly. “You got the exhaust valve on that Dodge ready to go? Mr. Tius is picking it up at four and--”

“You know damn well I’ve got the fuckin’ exhaust valve fixed!”

The hissed mantra of cursing is just loud enough for Eren to hear it as I stalk out of the garage, and part of me hopes he’ll say something about it so I have justifiable cause to sock him in the jaw. Grace under pressure is typically something I’m good at, but the last good old-fashioned fistfight I got in was five months and six counties ago, and God knows I’m in need of some stress relief.

The situation with Jean has a sort of backhanded gratification to it, stolen kisses when no one’s looking and weighted looks when someone is, and while having him close is better than nothing, I can’t get used to the ache in my chest whenever he pulls away. Maybe Eren and I have that much in common, being angry over something we never signed up for. He didn’t sign up for Jean hauling a broken car into his garage, and me… well.

I didn’t sign up for Jean. At least not to this extent. And yet here we are.

My restlessness is rearing its head again, and maybe that’s why the garage feels close and suffocating, although I tell myself that it's the heat to keep myself from climbing the walls. Three weeks. I try to think back to the last time I stayed in one place for three weeks. Years, definitely. Maybe even not since Telico. Three weeks, and I can already feel West Dallas wrapping dusty tendrils around my ankles and trying to drag me down. Every look at the horizon feels like a warning prickling at the back of my mind, calling me back out. I was never meant for a home or a family or any of that storybook shit. There was always more appeal to me in history than fairytales, something harder, something more real. Famous, infamous, loved, hated, all I ever wanted to be something that no one could deny. I can't be that here.

I had to re-evaluate my plan. Factor Jean into it. The overarching goal has always been out on the road, and now that I've got him, the only thing I see out in these dusty streets is an empty void. Complacency is far more dangerous than anything I'd be facing down out there.

This has been nothing more than an over-glorified, three-week-long job. Time to grab the goods and run.

I decide to talk to him about it as soon as we're out of earshot, rolling my shoulders and hoping that the customer is out of the front room and we could maybe get something hammered out before lunch. The door is tightly shut, but the hinges are quiet, swinging open with a rush of cool air into the garage.

"--n't want me coming over anymore you should just tell me." The voice speaking as I walk in is familiar, a flat alto without the heavy accent that clings to most people from West Dallas. I can’t see past the wall that sits between the door and the desk, but a flash of instinct stills me before I walk further, pausing with one hand still hovering over the doorknob.

Jean sighs over the sound of shuffling papers, a long, weary exhalation. “It ain’t that I don’t want you here, it’s just--”

“Then what is it?”

“I’m busy!” he snaps, the dull thud of a hand slamming on the desk as a chaser. Silence. Jean sighs again, shakier this time. “I’m busy, Mikasa. I’m up to my eyeballs in work and I got your brother on my ass and a million different deadlines to meet. I wish I had time, but I don’t.”

Mikasa?

I don’t realize how tightly my jaw is clenched until the ache of it spreads across the back of my skull, eyes narrowed like they could bore right through the wall. I’m a fool for letting it hurt me. I’m a damn fool for letting the fact that Mikasa is still in the picture for whatever reason twist in my gut like a white-hot blade, especially when it’s not like Jean’s making an effort to shove his tongue down her throat in front of me like he used to. But really, I’m a damn fool for letting any of this happen at all, so I can’t really be surprised  at the level of my own stupidity anymore.

“There’s no need to get fussy,” Mikasa responds coolly, her heels clicking on the floorboards… walking around the desk? “But you can’t tell me you ain’t been acting strange lately, Jean.”

More silence.

“Jean. Hey. Look at me.” Her voice softens, and I feel like I’m choking on my own throat, standing there and staring at the wall and still seeing her reach up to touch his face, guide his eyes to meet hers. The way I do when he tries to hide. “You’re distant. I feel like you’re standing here but you’re miles away. You can tell me what’s wrong, okay? I get enough of this with Eren. Please don’t shut me out.”

“I’m fine,” Jean says curtly, his heavier footfalls rounding the desk and fading across the front room. “C’mon. I’ll walk you back to your car.”

More footsteps, and the bell on the front door jingles. From the corner where I’m standing, I can see the two of them standing on the sidewalk through the window, exchanging words as they walk. Jean’s shoulders are tight, hands jammed in his pockets. When Mikasa turns around and stands up on her toes to kiss him, he darts to the side at the last minute so his lips brush her cheek instead.

I swallow the burn of bile in my throat and turn around to stalk back into the garage.

“I thought you were going on your lunch break,” Eren grumbles, glaring at me from where he’s still working on the engine he was fixing when I left.

“Decided I wasn’t hungry.”

“Damn. Just when I thought I had some peace and quiet.”

“What the _hell_ ,” I hiss, slamming the door behind me, “is your issue with me, Eren?”

“You want the outline or the whole goddamn novel?!” he half-shouts, slamming the hood down and stomping over to me, a few inches shorter but made larger-than-life by the pure, concentrated rage that precedes him. “I don’t know you from a hole in the ground, and I don’t want to. But I do know Jean. I’ve known Jean since we were kids, and I know that sometimes he gets too invested in other people’s shit. And he’s been a fuckin’ _mess_ since you showed up. Can’t focus on his work, staring off into space all the time, looks like he ain’t slept in days. I don’t know what kinda shit you’re pulling because I don’t know you, but I know that you’re not only messin’ with my employee, you’re messin’ with my best friend. And _that_ is my issue with you.”

“What makes you think it’s me?” As if we both don’t already know.

“I ain’t as dumb as you think I am,” Eren scoffs, looking at his wrench like he’s considering knocking me upside the head with it before tossing it back on the workbench.

“You sure about that?”

“And you’re a mouthy pain in the ass. That’s my other issue with you.” Fuming, Eren storms off across the garage and grabs his wallet out of his locker, throwing up one of the doors in a cloud of dust. “And if you ain’t gonna go on your lunch break, I’ll take mine.”

Slam. Dust. Silence.

It only takes about five seconds for me to feel like the walls are closing in on me again, ragged breaths raking up along the lining of my lungs and heart hammering in loud, wet thumps against my ribcage. One step at a time. Breathe in. Breathe out. Remember the plan. No one ever made the headlines by getting tied up in knots over the idea of a boy with broken dreams and pretty eyes coming out of knowing them the worse for wear. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that things get broken as you make your way through life. That’s why it’s easier to carry everything you need on your back and try not to pick up anything extra. The only thing you’ll get for attaching sentiment to something is watching it break.

Watching him break.

Trying to regain a grip on myself, I wander over to where the Model T is sitting in its corner, as still and dead as it’s been since the day it got here. Shaking fingers on the door handle, hot leather against the back of my shirt, the roof of the car over my head. Breathe in. Breathe out. The plan’s gone to hell in a handbasket. The only thing left to figure out is how I’m going to fix the mess I’ve gotten myself into.

The door to the front room bangs open. Footsteps, Jean grumbling under his breath, tools slamming around on the workbench. I should get up. I should go back to work and pretend nothing’s wrong and spend what time I can buy myself working out how I can talk my way out of a dead-end town with Jean in tow. Instead, I just lie there. Breathe in. Breathe out. Plans and dreams, history books and fairytales, the road under my heels with a gun in my hand and the dimple in Jean’s cheek when he smiles.

Pa always did say that you can’t have everything. But I’ve been proving him wrong since the day he wrote me off as a dead man, and I don’t have any intentions of stopping anytime soon.

I sit up long enough to snag Jean around the waist as he walks by, tugging him into the car so that he lands across the seat on top of me with a surprised yelp. He sputters and glares down at me. I grin and kiss the tip of his nose. “Hi, darlin’.”

“Eren--” he starts.

“--is on his lunch break, which means that right now it’s you, me, and an empty garage.” I finish for him, skating fingers up his spine beneath the fabric of his work shirt and taking quiet satisfaction in the shudder that blooms outwards from the touch. “This car ain’t good for much else right now. Might as well use it, yeah?”

A flash of something that looks almost like guilt flickers across Jean’s face before he bites it back, blinking at me for a few seconds before a faltering smile settles on his lips. “Yeah. Yeah, might as well.”

I’m not used to having anything truly my own. Everything I’ve had for the last four years has been something I stole, and up until now, even Jean’s felt that way, fleeting glances with hidden meanings, quick kisses in secluded corners and the creaky dark of his room when the rest of the house is sleeping. It didn’t take hearing him and Mikasa earlier to remind me that he’s not rightfully mine, but now I can almost convince myself that he is. As good as I am at lying to other people, I’ve never really been inclined to do it to myself before. But being able to hold him like this, able to feel his heartbeat against my ribcage, to kiss him at my leisure without having to worry about who could see, that changes something.

He’s been a mess since I showed up. I’m not good for him. I’m not good for anyone.

But he smiles and pulls me closer and muffles a satisfied hum against my lips, and for a moment, I pretend that I didn’t snatch everything out from under him just to make him unbalanced enough to fall into my arms.

And God, what I’d give to convince myself that this is something I could have for good, one thing I could keep. Four years of gunpowder and dust and more money passing through my palms than I ever cared to count, and I still haven’t been able to hold onto anything good. Connie’s sitting in a jail cell. I’ve forgotten what Maura’s laugh sounds like. And Jean…

Well. There’s a ticking time bomb on this whole thing. I can feel it in the thrumming pulse points of his wrists when I press my thumbs to them and roll him over, hands pinned to the worn leather of the seat above his head. _Tick, tick, tick_ goes his jugular vein beneath lips and teeth down the column of his throat, goes the work-worn structure of his spine when he arches up into every touch, goes the silent space between his stuttered moans when I grind my hips down _hard_ into his and he gasps into the crook of my neck.

I could fight this. I could make this time different, or at least convince myself that it will be that way, could kiss him breathless, write my name in fingerprint-bruises across the span of his narrow hips. I could forget the fact that Eren could come back any minute, could pull the car door shut behind Jean and set us apart in our own corner of the universe and fuck him until he can’t remember his own name, left to settle for taking on the title of _mine, mine, mine_ breathed out against his skin.

Or for once, I could tell the truth, to him and to myself. Face the fact that I have to steal him the way I steal everything else.

“I’m gettin’ outta here,” I hum into the patch of tender skin behind his ear, blunt nails raking down over the seashell surface of his ribs. “Come with me.”

Tick, tick, tick. Boom.

Jean pushes me back with a frown, confusion flashing golden behind his irises. “You what?”

“Well not _now_.” Rolling my eyes, I go back to my previous task of working on the top buttons of his shirt, smirking through the shadows cast by the steering wheel and windshield. “But soon. Three weeks in West Dallas is enough to kill a man. God knows how you done it for two years. Reckon I’m healed up enough to hit the road any time I want. So come with me.”

“Marco--”

“And I’m ready to give up on this damn car ever gettin’ fixed. Not a problem. We can snag another one anywhere. Get over the state line, do a couple jobs, head North. Get you an audition; you’ll be playin’ that trumpet at Carnegie Hall in a month. You and me, darlin’, the sky's the limit, the world's our oyster and all that shit.”

 _“Marco.”_ He grabs at my wrists and hauls himself up, eyes wide and scared and full of the most raw, God-awful hurt I’ve ever seen. “No.”

“What do you mean, ‘no?’” I ask. It’s not sinking in. I refuse to let it sink in.

“I mean no,” he whispers, voice wavering. “I can’t leave. Me leaving has never been an option.”

“Of course it’s an--”

“My mom and my sister are here!” Jean looks at me like I’m ten shades of crazy for even suggesting it, and I am, I know I am, but there’s always been a part of me hoping that I’d be crazy enough to make him see the same thing out there that I do. A fool’s hope at best, a disaster at worst. “I can’t up and leave them. They can’t make it on their own, I can’t, I… not for this. Not for anything.”

“That’s an excuse and you know it,” I say flatly.

“You’re asking me to choose between you and my family!”

“And I’m givin’ you a _choice!_ ” In the close confines of the car, my voice rises more than I mean for it to, bouncing off the hard surfaces and ringing in my own ears. “And you’re backpedaling and spoutin’ off excuses, what else is new?!”

Jean’s eyes narrow, a vein in his temple pulsing visibly. “You don’t know the _first thing--_ ”

“Yes I do! And so do you!” Something hot and uncomfortable expands outwards in my chest, and the car is too cramped, everywhere is too cramped; I stumble out onto the oil-stained concrete trying not to gasp. “How much do you make in a year at this place?”

“That’s irrelevant,” he hisses, climbing out after me and buttoning his shirt with clumsy, preoccupied fingers.

“The hell it is. And you know as well as I do that two good-sized jobs with me will get you more than a whole year workin’ your fingers to the bone in this shithole,” I snap back, gesturing around the stuffy confines of the garage. “I ain’t askin’ you to abandon your family. I’m giving you the chance to _help them_.  Put a down payment on a better house. Get Nettie some new clothes. Give them the life you know they deserve, the one you sure as _shit_ can’t give them at this rate. You know what I’m puttin’ on the table here, Jean, and you’re too goddamn _scared_ to consider everything else that comes with it--”

“Everything else like what?!” he laughs coldly, slamming the door of the Model T shut behind him.

“EVERYTHING ELSE LIKE ME.” My throat aches from the explosive force that slams into it, a ragged shout that hurts all the way down to the core of me. “EVERYTHING ELSE LIKE US.”

“What the hell is _us_ , Marco?” I can’t tell whether Jean’s an inch from breaking down sobbing or punching me in the face. Maybe both. “This? A couple good moments and a whole life of duckin’ around the truth? I’ve seen what happens to people around here when everyone finds out they’re… like _that_ , okay, and it’s bad. You don’t get it.”

“Oh, I don’t get it. _I don’t get it?!_ ” I have to turn around, walk away from him to keep from screaming. Breathe in. Breathe out. Realize that the rage in my veins hasn’t gone away in four years, isn’t likely to go anywhere anytime soon. He stands there with his family and his life and his girl and has the nerve to tell me that I don’t get it.

_Our son is dead._

“I oughta knock the livin’ shit outta you,” I whisper, shaking my head and whipping back around to stalk over to him. “I really should. ‘Cause there’s a lotta things in this world I don’t get, but trust me, this is one thing I know a hell of a lot more about than you. And don’t you _fuckin’_ dare stand there and tell me what I don’t know. Not when you consistently lie to yourself about what you do know.”

“I know that I make bad decisions when it comes to you,” he chokes out, eyes swimming, tawny and too-bright. “And I know that I can’t let Mom and Ninette suffer because of that. I can’t go.”

“Okay, this is sudden. I understand that.” A breathy, half-panicked laugh hitches up my throat, hands settling on either side of his face. “You’re a little wound up. That’s all. Look, darlin’, you got some time to mull this over. It’ll take me a while to case out another car I can take, so--”

“You don’t have to steal another car,” Jean whispers, looking away from me. “The Model T’s fixed.”

I stand there and blink at him for a few seconds, gaze darting back and forth between him and the car, unable to process it. “But you said that you couldn’t even touch it yet.”

“I lied about the parts being on backorder.” He’s shaking so violently that I can feel the tremors beneath my fingertips, bottom lip drawn up between his teeth. “The parts came in from Galveston after two weeks, just like I told you. I had it fixed in an hour. Got new keys made and everything.”

And he looks so broken, so lost, that I don’t even have it in me to be angry. All I can do is sigh and brush strands of messy blonde back so I have room to lean down and rest my forehead against his. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I wanted you to stay.” His voice breaks on the last word, hands balling up into fists in the fabric of my shirt. “Because I knew you’d wanna go as soon as you had the car and you’re the first thing that’s felt okay in two fuckin’ years and _I wanted you to stay._ ”

He wanted me to stay. Stay for what? For a lifetime of fading into the background like I swore I never would? For standing by and watching him build up his perfect little storybook life with his family and his job and Mikasa while I stand in the wings to hold him when he can’t stand the harsh glare of the stage lights shining on his scripted existence anymore? To be a dirty little secret? I don’t have a place here. I don’t have a place anywhere, really, but the harsh reality of just how invasive I am hasn’t hit home until now. Jean belongs here. He belongs to his family and his girl, belongs to the life he said he was fine with before I came along. He doesn’t belong to me.

Not like that’s ever stopped me before.

“I was never gonna stay in Dallas, Jean,” I tell him, stepping back. Giving him room to follow, or letting go. That’s his choice, not mine. “You’re the only reason I ain’t left yet, but I was never gonna stay. I got no place here.”

“I’m here,” Jean says with a watery smile.

“And you could be with me.” I hate how desperate I sound. I hate that this is what he reduces me to, that all my careful plans are falling down around my head because of him.

“But not here,” He laughs, no humor in it, just a bone deep sadness as he shakes his head and looks around the garage. “God, not here.”

“No, not here. You’re right,” I nod, stepping away from him and trying to bite back the feeling of being torn apart when I do. “That’s why you should come with me. I know what it’s like here, but it’s not… out there, we could have somethin’, you and me. Out there, can’t nobody tell us what to do.”

And for a moment, for the smallest fraction of a second, I think I’ve got him. I can see the hope growing from that promise, blooming out beneath his skin and lighting him up. So close. I’m so close, to the point that he steps forward and closes the space between us, elegant fingers reaching out to run through my sweat-damp hair. And my father said I couldn’t have it all.

“I can’t.”

The floor falls out from under me. The world caves in, the sky goes dark, every awful, overdone trope of what happens when the best part of your life passes you by comes crashing down on me at once. This was never part of the plan. He was never part of the plan. The fact that I ever tried to factor him in at all was the only flaw. I am the source of my own undoing.

“You can. But you won’t.” Hollow. Empty. I don’t even have it in me to laugh at how perfect the irony in all of this is. All this time, I’ve been thinking that my restlessness was my punishment for every sin I’ve ever committed, when in reality it was anything but. This. This is my penance. Knowing what I could have, being close enough to touch it.

Watching him slip away.

Breathe in. Breathe out. I’ve never been able to hold onto anything good. The only thing that doesn’t drain through my fingers is the plan, and the plan has been around much longer than Jean. It existed before him. It will exist after him. It has to.

“I’m leavin’ at ten o’clock tonight,” I force myself to say, force myself to look at him, at his pretty eyes and the invisible weight on his shoulders and the happy-ever-afters that I never even wanted until him. “From this garage. With or without you. With or without you, Jean, I mean it, I…”

I mean it. I am nothing without my convictions. Nothing without my plans. Without them, I’m just an empty grave on a family plot in Telico. The fact that I’m not much more than that without him is something that he doesn’t need to know.

He doesn’t say anything, and neither do I. Is this what closure is supposed to be? It feels like an open wound just standing there and looking at him, an unsolvable impasse sitting between us like a canyon, and I want to scream, want to throw something. It’s not supposed to end like this. I’m supposed to make history, supposed to make my mark, and Jean…

Jean deserves more than this. My stubborn, smart-mouthed, short-tempered, incredible, beautiful boy, he deserves more than a dried-up life in a dried-up town. He deserves more and won’t let himself have it. I’ve seen my share of sad things, but I think that might be the worst of them. I can’t stay here and let that reality drive itself home any more than it already has. I’ll fall apart at the seams if it does. Restlessness pulls at my limbs and my head and my heart, and I’ve always been one to try for the last word, every last-ditch effort until I’ve got nothing left in me.

All I can do is lean down and press my lips to his forehead and whisper, “Please think it over, darlin’. Please.”

Breathe in. Breathe out. Get my stuff out of my locker and walk away from the garage. Up the street. Away from the pervasive ache of loss gnawing at the pit of my stomach. Away from this.

Away from him.

Sometimes a job goes sour. Sometimes I don’t end up stealing what I set out to steal and it leaves a bad taste in my mouth when I look back on it. I know that feeling. I’m unpleasantly familiar with it. And this, whatever this is, it isn’t the feeling of a messed-up heist or walking away without turning any real profit. It’s something so much worse.

See, when I get emotional, I get sloppy. I do things I shouldn’t do. I don’t think things through and I end up making regrettable decisions, and more often than not it domino-effects into a whole dust storm of shit.

I do things like walking all the way back to the Kirschteins’ in the late summer heat, thanking the God I’m not sure exists that Mrs. Kirschtein and Ninette aren’t home so I don’t have to say those goodbyes on top of the one that’s still ripping me to shreds with every step. I do things like taking all the money I lifted from the pawnshop register and rolling it up in a paper bag and sticking it on the top shelf of the linen closet. I can always get more. I do really, really foolish things like stretching out across Jean’s bed one last time and breathing in the scent that lingers on the threadbare quilt, cigarettes and motor oil.

I tell myself that I have things under control, start getting ready to roll out. Pack up my things and change back into my street clothes. Dig the .45 Connie gave me out from behind the dresser, let the weight of it settle in my hand. I’ve said it so many times. The open road and a gun in my hand, that’s who I am. That’s home. Not this. Not him. I just wish that I could still believe it.

Still, the cool metal tucked into my waistband clears my mind a little, helps me straighten my priorities. I get ready to leave as if I’ll be leaving without Jean. No use getting my hopes up. A choice between me and his family is no choice at all. Bag packed, debts paid, the entire house swept clean of every trace of me. Like I was never here. A ghost. I seem to make a profession out of being a dead man walking.

The walk back to town saps every ounce of energy I have left in me, and it strikes me halfway there that I have nowhere to go. I can’t go back to the garage, can’t look at him for eternal hours and watch the decision settle across his face to stay here. That’s the worst part of it. I can’t even be angry at Jean for leaving me when I’m the one leaving him. There’s nothing to do and five hours to kill by the time I make it back into West Dallas, and the clamor rising in my head will drive me insane by that time. I need to get myself settled. Remind myself of the plan.

That, and I need some cash for the road.

There’s no real thought that goes into selecting the ramshackle little grocery store five blocks over from the garage. In fact, it’s all muscle memory from the moment I decide that I need to do a job. I’m good at this. Practiced. Even so, a homecoming never felt so empty.

Straight in through the front door, one warning shot into the ceiling. “All right, folks, everyone on the floor, and I’ll be needin’ the contents of that register.”

This used to feel good. Used to feel like progress. Now it just feels like the precursor to a bag of cash sitting in the passenger seat where he should be when I finally get out of here.

When I get emotional, I get sloppy. I do things I shouldn’t do. I do things like walking into a grocery store with a gun and not noticing the police car parked outside until there’s a cold tickle of steel at the base of my skull and a calm murmur behind me of “Put the gun down, son. Hands in the air.”

“Goddammit,” I whisper, cold metal around my wrists and a lead weight slipping into my stomach. I got sloppy.

This is what I’ve made of myself. This is me without him.

 


	10. Jean

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like I should probably mention that I have a [tumblr](http://southspinner.tumblr.com)

I used to like being in the garage alone.

The smell of motor oil hangs heavy in the air and there's a stillness about the place, every sound bouncing off the concrete floor and hanging there for a long moment before it dissipates. This used to be where I found whatever small measure of peace I could. Just me, the staticky rattle of the radio, and the cars.

I've always liked cars. They're easier than people. All those tiny parts working together seamlessly to make them go forward, and if something wears out, you replace it. If something breaks, you fix it. A giant puzzle, the thrill of figuring out what went wrong followed by the gratification of making it right again. Real life doesn't work that way. There are no interchangeable parts for when your heart gets weary, no way to patch yourself when you break down. I found some comfort in being able to fix something tangible even if I couldn't fix myself, felt settled in a place where I could be constructive in the middle of my life crashing down around my head.

This place used to feel like home. Marco walks out the door, and now it feels like anything but.

The stillness I used to love has turned stagnant, the hot air oppressive and heavy, clogging my throat. It hasn't been this silent in three weeks. I've grown used to existing with the constant sound that came with Marco’s company, of his bad jokes and laughter and the silken hum of his voice wrapping around his plans. Now all I can hear is dust settling on the floor and the echo of his parting words humming in my ears.

_Please think it over, darlin’. Please._

What is there to think about? There’s too much here depending on me to allow for the possibility of me running away. I never asked to be the last creaking, unstable support beam holding my family up over the abyss, but it’s the hand I was dealt. There’s Ninette and Mom to think about. There’s work to think about. There’s Mikasa and every unfair thing I’ve put her through to think about.

But then there’s Marco. There’s Marco and all the bombast and bold promise that comes with him. There’s the way I didn’t realize that I couldn’t breathe in this town until his lips were on mine and he flooded my lungs and forced me to re-evaluate everything I ever told myself was true. As much as I try not to acknowledge it, there’s Marco to think about.

I never wanted this. I never wanted every breath I took to feel like another maneuver in a battle with myself. For the umpteenth time, I feel as though I’m being ripped apart, slumping against the wall and letting out a shaky breath. My hands wind tight in my hair and tug, trying to find some sort of grounding in the pain as I sink to the floor and try not to cave in entirely, my traitorous heart slamming against my ribs like it wants to jump out of my chest and follow him.

The open road or Dallas. Marco or everyone else. How am I supposed to make that choice? The body can’t function without a heart, but it doesn’t do much better without a head. What happens when both are ripped away and scattered to different corners of existence?

This. Me. I’m what happens. A ball of nerves and unshed tears trying to hold on to what I have with bloody, ragged fingernails even as what I want tries to tug me away. This is who I am, who I have to be, I’ve known that for years. But trying to imagine my world the way it’s been for so long seems impossible after finally letting myself hear the could-be’s, after finding the hope of something more and letting him hold me so close that I can still feel him under my skin.

I can’t go back to the way things were before, responsibility be damned. A life of lies and constantly feeling empty isn’t that much better than death. Honesty with myself has become my own undoing.

A sob catches in my throat.

What is there to think about? Nothing. He never gave me a choice, and he knows it.

The garage door rattles up, and I’m foolish enough to let something spark in my chest, a false hope that he got halfway up the road and turned around and came back. Hastily blinking to clear the prickling sensation at the backs of my eyes, I sniff in a short breath and hop up, already feeling the change of heart sitting heavy on my tongue.

Get me out of here. I’m sorry I’m scared and broken and probably about as good at robbing stores as I am at baking cakes, but please, get me out of here. Take me with you.

“The hell’s wrong with you?” Eren snorts through a mouthful of the sandwich in his hand, kicking the catch on the door so it rolls shut with a bang behind him.

“Nothin’.” I do my best to become very interested in organizing the tools on the workbench.

“Bullshit.”

“I’m fine.”

“You know you’re a shit liar?” Yes, actually. Ironically, the last person who told me I was a shit liar is the source of all my recent lies. Eren wanders over and hops up to sit on the newly-cleared space on the workbench, feet swinging back and forth as he shoves down the last bite of his sandwich and mumbles at me with his mouth full. “You do this thing when you’re lyin’ where you gotta have something to do with your hands. Done it since we were kids.”

“Yeah. Well.” He’s got me there. Pursing my lips, I move to one of the cars parked nearby and fling the hood up, hands twitching. I can’t fix this. Might as well fix something.

“And where’s your stray?” he asks offhandedly. If he noticed my hand tighten around the edge of the open hood, he doesn’t say anything about it, heels thudding rhythmically against the leg of the workbench. “Not that I’m complaining. I miss when it was just you and me here. You’re a pain in my ass, but at least I like you.”

“I don’t know where he is,” I half-whisper, glaring down into the engine. Bad spark plug. Worn out timing belt. I can have it fixed in twenty minutes. There used to be a sense of power in that. Now there’s just a sharp crack and a blaze of pain across my palm as the spark plug breaks off in my hand. “Ow, dammit!”

“Careful, dumbass,” Eren frowns, jumping up and yanking a clean handkerchief out of his shirt pocket when my hand comes up out of the car bloody. The sticky red clinging to my skin makes me dizzy, nauseous, and I’m glad for the first opportunity to cover it up, torn flesh stinging against the fabric.

“It’s fine,” I hiss, “I’m fine.”

“The hell you are. Hurtin’ yourself trying to change a damn spark plug, look like you seen a ghost. Go park yourself in the front room; I’ll get something to clean that thing.” Grumbling under his breath, Eren hauls me by the back of the shirt collar into the front room, plunking me down in one of the chairs while he rummages around under the desk.

“Don’t worry ‘bout it,” I mumble, but telling Eren not to fuss is like telling him not to breathe, and the only response I get is an increase in the intensity of his grumbling, something about _got your goddamn head so far up your own ass you can’t see the daylight_ as he pops back up with a bottle of iodine and a scarily determined look. I remember Marco tensing up and cursing for all he was worth when Mikasa was cleaning the cut down his torso, swallow heavily in apprehension. “There ain’t no need…”

“Shut up,” he snaps, crossing over and grabbing the handkerchief out of my hand to douse it in brown liquid. “Last thing I need is you getting lockjaw and putting me behind a week.”

“God forbid you actually do some work yourself - ow!”

“Don’t be a baby,” Eren snorts, grabbing my wrist and yanking my injured hand forward to dab at it with the iodine-soaked cloth.

I try to scoff, but it comes out as a pained hiss. My whole hand feels like it’s on fire, the blazing ache radiating up my arm. “Maybe I wouldn’t be if you’d stop actin’ like my mother.”

“See, this is how I know you’re upset over something.” He shakes his head, pressing a scrap of clean gauze over the cut and tearing off a strip of medical tape between his teeth. Mikasa must have left some medical supplies behind the desk. Eren’s more accident-prone than I am. “You only do stupid shit when you’re upset. Remember that time you left your trumpet at school and you were so afraid of your old man throwin’ a fit that you tried to climb the front gate to go get it?”

“Yeah. You gave me a leg up and I fell off the top. Kicked you right in the face on the way down,” I laugh, looking at the noticeable bump in the bridge of his nose, the thin scar that cuts across it. “You bled like a stuck pig all over the front of your uniform. I thought your mom was gonna kill both of us.”

“Gave me a ration of shit the whole time Dad was setting my nose,” he nods, a crooked grin stretching at his lips as he tapes the gauze in place with a firm press of his thumb. This is all too familiar.

I think back to the dust-storm-darkness of my kitchen, warm skin under my fingers and the lulling drawl of Marco’s voice as he talked his way through the pain when I was cleaning the wound he got doing God knows what. Already, it feels like I’m remembering something that happened a lifetime ago. The absence of him settles in me again, stings like the lash of a whip. I swallow hard, try to focus on something else. Anything other than the cavernous, raw space opening up in my chest.

This is the rest of my life if I let him go tonight. Fading memories and trying to fight the weight of all my could-have-beens crushing me into something weary and barely alive.

Eren wanders back to stash the gauze and iodine behind the desk, perches his elbows on the worn wood and says, “So are you gonna tell me why you look like you got a shit turned sideways, or am I gonna have to guess?”

For the smallest fraction of a second, the weariness and the fear and the crushing weight of all my mistakes almost makes me cave, collapse back into the chair and sob for an hour and tell him everything. Eren isn’t a magic cure-all, but for as long as I can remember he’s been the closest thing to one that I have. He couldn’t bring Dad back from the dead, but he could give me a way to look after Mom and Ninette. He couldn’t stop the constant internal scream of everything I’m afraid of, but he could sit and listen while I got too drunk and smoked too much and fumed about it for hours. He couldn’t help me over the school’s front gate when I was thirteen years old and scared out of my wits of the hell that would descend if I came home without my trumpet, but he could vault over himself, broken, bleeding nose and all, and come back with a sticky-crimson grin and a boxy black case ten minutes later.

But for everything he’s done, for all the trust I have in him, he’s never seen the contents of my little box of secrets. I can’t put that on him now. Not only for his own peace of mind, but for fear of how he’d look at me if I did.

“If I were to just… disappear,” I start, trying to keep it vague, “if you were to just wake up tomorrow and I wasn’t here. What would you do?”

His grip tenses on the edge of the desk for a moment, shoulders stiffening before he rolls them back and says, “I’d call your house and tell your mother to roll you out of bed because your ass is late for work.”

“Eren.” It only takes the waver in my voice to make him look up, expression going from boredom to concern in a second flat. I don’t realize how tightly my hands are balled up in my lap until a spark of pain shoots up my arm, the fresh bandages around my palm stained by a bloom of red. “I mean it. If something happened and I wasn’t here all of a sudden, would you look after Mom and Ninette? Make sure they’re okay? I know it’s a lot to ask, but--”

“Then don’t ask it,” he hisses, rounding the desk and yanking me up out of the chair by my shirt collar, eyes narrowed to green slits. “Don’t fuckin’ talk like that. You got people here who need you. I don’t care how bad whatever’s gotten to you is, Jean; just because your dad pulled that shit don’t mean I’m gonna let you come anywhere close, y’hear?”

“I ain’t gonna kill myself, genius,” I snap, shoving him off with my good hand and stalking across the front room, falling into a pattern of pacing. “I meant that, hypothetically, if I were to just… leave. Pack up and ship out.”

Eren frowns and crosses his arms tightly over his chest. “And why in the hell would you do that?”

“Say a business opportunity came up.”

“Say you’re full of shit.”

“I’m being hypothetical!” Eren doesn’t buy it and I’m too worked up to care, raking a hand repeatedly through my hair as a nervous outlet and pacing until I’m sure I must be wearing a groove in the floorboards. "I need to know they'd be okay if I wasn't here. I need to know someone'd make sure they had enough to eat, someone'd check up on Mom and keep Nettie from fightin' boys twice her size and I just _need to know_ , Eren. I need to. Hypothetically."

"Oughta knock you on your ass for having the nerve to ask," he grumbles, kicking at the corner of the desk and shooting me a glare as I continue to flit back and forth across the front room. "You know that if you got hit by a truck or something my first priority would be your folks. That applies for you _hypothetically_ deciding to be a piece of shit and run off, too."

A good portion of the tension pulling tight under my skin relaxes, a short huff of relief punctuating the dry heat of the stuffy air as I look over at him with a weak, wobbly smile. "Okay. Thank you."

My decision has been made for me. The reassurance that my family will be taken care of solves a handful of my reservations, even though I know I'm grasping at straws to justify myself. _Out there, we could have somethin', you and me,_ Marco said, and I wanted - I want - so badly to believe him that a promise from Eren and the half-formed delusions of grandeur swirling through my mind are as good as gospel. There’s a spring in my step when I turn around to head back into the garage, the beginnings of a smile pulling upwards at the corners of my lips. I’ve spent the past two years of my life fixing things. Maybe I’ve finally gotten enough practice to be able to repair some of my broken parts.

Eren plants a hand on my shoulder and drags me back before I can get through the door. “Hey, no. We’re talkin’ about this. What the hell’re you gonna do?”

I blink once, twice, try in vain to spin up a lie. “I told you, it was just--”

“‘Hypothetical’ my _ass_ , Jean.” It comes out as a snarl, his teeth bared as he gives my shoulder an emphatic little shove and stalks away, fists balled up at his sides. I’ve become familiar over the years with how fast Eren’s notoriously short fuse burns when it comes to certain things, and lying to him is a one-way ticket to an explosion. There are about a hundred examples of hypocrisy I could call him on in regards to that, but he’s angry enough as it is, slamming a hand down on the desk and gripping the edge so hard that I can hear the wood creak. “You been actin’ more skittish than a cat on a hot tin roof for weeks, staring off into space when you think no one’s looking. Can’t count the number of times you’ve looked me in the eye and told me a bold-faced _lie_ as of late. You got your mom worried sick and Mikasa worried sick and hell, you got _me_ worried sick. And now I leave you on your own long enough to go get a fuckin’ sandwich and I come back to you in a nervous breakdown going off about skippin’ town? What the hell is going on with you?”

“I…” There’s no way I can tell him.

No way I can tell him, but Eren’s too observant for my own good, catches the fleeting glance I shoot out at the Model T sitting out in the garage. The color drains from his face, and he all but launches out from behind the desk, grabbing my shoulders and giving me a little shake. “No. Jean, _no_.”

“I can explain!”

“No you can’t, because if you think that’s a good idea then there ain’t a scrap of logic in your melon head!”

“How ‘bout you back off and let me make my own decisions?!” I lash back, shoving Eren away and walking back into the garage with him hot on my heels. “I know what I’m doing.”

“And even if that were true, you don’t know _him_ ,” Eren seethes, spitting _him_ like a profanity instead of a pronoun. “No one here does. He just rolled up out of the blue all smiles and smooth talk; you ever heard of a goddamn _con artist,_ Jean? What, is he tellin’ you there’s some big business endeavor out on the road? You’ll end up hawkin’ shit door to door out of a suitcase.”

Actually, if everything goes according to plan, I’ll end up robbing folks at gunpoint. But that’s all semantics.

“We’re gonna head up north,” I tell him, at least a scrap of truth because Eren can spot a lie from a mile away. “All kinds of big bands up there, if I can get an audition…”

“D’you really need me to tell you what a bad idea that is?” Eren laughs coldly, shaking his head. “He’s _playing_ you.”

“It ain’t like that!” Or at least, I’ve been praying to whatever god that will listen to me that it’s not like that. I’ll be the first to attest that Marco can wrap someone around his finger with nothing more than a few honeyed words, but I want to believe that I’m not just another one of his plans.

_I don’t have to fuckin’ try to feel what I feel for you. It’d be easier if I didn’t._

I wasn’t supposed to happen. _We_ weren’t supposed to happen. If Marco’s willingness to factor me into the architecture of his life isn’t sincerity, I can’t be sure what is.

“It ain’t like that,” I say again, more to myself than to Eren. But he catches something, some soft edge in my voice, the way I look back at the car and remember minutes that feel like years ago with Cheshire Cat smiles and promises whispered against my skin. He catches it, and my delicate house of cards gets slammed with a hurricane.

Eren slumps back against the workbench, a hand coming up over his mouth, and whispers, “Oh God.”

“Eren…” I start.

“Oh _God_ ,” he chokes out, tanned skin going moon-pale. “I’m gonna be sick.”

And there it is. There are the results of my unintentional honesty, skating across his face in brief flashes. Disbelief. Betrayal. Disgust. I feel like someone’s hit me in the stomach with a baseball bat.

“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” I tell him, like that will fix everything.

“That don’t mean much when you’re still planning to run off and do who-knows-what with _him_ \--”

“What in the hell makes you hate Marco so much?” I snap, something rubbing me the wrong way about how Eren says _him_ like Dad used to say _those people._ Eren sits there and looks at me like he doesn’t even know me anymore, and something dark and bitter in the pit of my stomach wonders if this is all it takes to throw years out the window, one moment of me acting in my own interests.

My old man always told me that walking around with my head in the clouds was an inherently selfish thing to do, but a brain full of dreams beats one full of a nine millimeter round any day. Funny, Dad. It seems our choices damn us either way.

Eren doesn’t say anything. Just grabs his tools off the bench and walks back to his work, shoulders tight and jaw set in a hard line.

And he stays like that for the rest of the shift.

The hours until seven o’clock pass in silence, and I try to lose myself in broken engines and worn-out parts, try not to feel the weight of the looks sitting on my shoulders when my back is turned. This is the price of freedom. Watching everything you’ve known turn away from you. Losing it. Maybe we’ve all gotten it wrong, understanding what it is to be free. Maybe somewhere along the line, we’ve lost the truth that freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.

I’m getting my stuff out of my locker with a heavy heart when Eren finally breaks the silence. “Don’t do this.”

“Why not?” I ask, slamming the locker shut with a hollow bang and staring at his feet rather than his face. I don’t want to see his repulsion again.

“Because you got a _life_ here,” he says, and if I didn’t know better I would say that he sounds almost broken, grip tightening on the hood of his current project before he brings it down with a rusty, creaking rumble. “There are people here counting on you. Your mom and your sister. Mikasa. Me. You belong here. You belong with us.”

I laugh, but it comes out hollow, rasping up my throat like a dull razor. “The person you expect me to be belongs here. The person I am sure as hell don’t.”

“What does that even mean?”

“You wouldn’t get it.”

Eren snorts and mutters something under his breath before he grimaces at me and says, “No. Don’t suppose I would.”

“Listen, just… don’t tell anyone. People are gonna ask questions, and if they knew, I don’t…” Against my will, I picture the look on my mother’s face, picture Ninette growing up thinking that I’m something to be ashamed of. The unborn disappointment of everyone I hold dear feels like an anchor dragging me down, water flooding my lungs and drowning me slowly. “Mikasa’s gonna ask questions. Make something up. She’d hate me if she knew.”

“And it wouldn’t do to hurt Mikasa’s feelings,” Eren says softly, the measured cadence of his voice betrayed by the flash of rage in his eyes. Breaking his sister’s heart. Tack that onto the list of things he’ll never forgive me for.

We stand there for a moment, looking at each other, both of us a little more broken than we’d like to admit.

“This is all gonna blow up in your face, Jean,” he says.

“I know,” I say.

I know.

Eren walks over and lays a hand on my shoulder, mouth working soundlessly for a moment before he gets his words straightened out and bypasses what he wants to say for what he thinks I need to hear. “I’ll tell ‘em a business opportunity came up. And when he’s done tearin’ you to shreds and you come back, there’ll still be a place for you here.”

“I ain’t coming back to this,” I sigh, looking around the garage and feeling strangely homesick. “I can’t live like this.”

“But you can live with him?”

“He has a _name_ , Eren.” The rebuke collides with my gritted teeth, somewhere between a growl and a hiss. “And yeah, I can.”

He goes to say something but catches himself again, sucking in a deep breath through his nose and screwing his eyes shut like he could block this all out if he tried hard enough. When he opens them again, he looks calmer. Resigned. The hand on my shoulder squeezes and drops to his side. “I really hope I’m wrong about this, man. For your sake, I hope I’m wrong.”

“Yeah,” I nod stiffly, grabbing my car keys and ducking out over one of the open garage doors. “I’ll write.”

The shadows of fenceposts are long across the road on my way home, dust kicking up in a cloud ahead of me, and over the cranky hum of the truck’s tired engine all I can think is that I’ve never known Eren to be wrong before.

Mom’s putting dinner on the table when I walk in, smiles softly across the kitchen. “Y’all are late. You and Marco should go wash up before your food gets cold.”

My breath clots into a hard mass in my windpipe, and I choke out, “Marco didn’t come home with me.”

“Oh, did he end up with an overtime shift?”

“Yeah,” I nod, painting on a smile and wandering back the hallway. “He’ll be along later, I’m sure.”

I may be a shit liar, but I can function well enough as long as I don’t have to look someone in the eye. There’s a stabbing pain in my chest as I all but stumble back the hallway and into my room. Every trace of Marco is gone, his clothes no longer littering the floor, my bed made up neatly, but it’s not as though I didn’t expect that. Still, it feels wrong without him, something uneasy trickling down my spine as I dump out my work bag on top of my bedspread and re-pack it, three or four changes of clothes, a framed family photo, a half-empty pack of cigarettes. It’s strange, how little you really need when you’re leaving everything and everyone behind.

I almost forget to reach under the bed and grab my trumpet case, setting it carefully next to my bag before staring at the scene I’ve created, the haphazard collective of what I guess truly matters to me. This is what I get to have out there. Clothes, a picture, stale smokes, a trumpet, and Marco.

I want that to be enough. I pray that it’ll be enough.

“Jean!” Mom calls from the kitchen, a little impatiently.

“Coming!” I yell back, staring at my packed-up life as I back out of the room and go to sit down for my last meal with my family.

Please, please, _please_ let it be enough.

I’m strong enough to make it through dinner without breaking, and I don’t know whether that’s something to be proud or ashamed of. It’s a practiced motion. Stomp it down. Lock it up. Don’t let them think that something’s wrong. Mom prattles on about some bake sale or something her women’s group at church is planning, and I nod along absently, roasted potatoes like ash in my mouth with every struggling swallow.

“Hey, Jean, oo wanna come play catch w’me ‘fter dinner?” Ninette asks, mouth full to the point that her cheeks are blown out like a chipmunk’s.

“Ninette, _really_ ,” Mom groans, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Manners.”

“Aw, Ma, Jean don’t care.”

“I’ll care if you choke on a potato and go blue in the face, kiddo,” I laugh and try to make it sound real, reaching over to nudge her shoulder. “But yeah, we can play catch.”

If anything, that only makes her wolf her food down faster, hopping up and sprinting back the hall to get her baseball and mitt while I help Mom clean up the dishes. The kitchen goes quiet, nothing but the clink of old china and the metallic patter of water hitting the bottom of the sink.

“You’re having a rough day,” Mom hums, rubbing at a spoon with a dish towel until it shines before putting it back in the drawer.

I shake my head, scooting in beside her so I can help with scrubbing off the plates. “M’fine.”

“No, see, it’s right here.” Shaking her head, she reaches up and presses one pale fingertip to the center of my forehead right above my eyebrows. “Even if you’re trying not to frown, you get a little line right there. You have since you were little. Your father was the exact same way.”

I manage not to wince at the comparison until after she’s turned around to dry off something else, putting the last plate on top of the sink and wiping my hands on my jeans. Mom turns back around, and before I can really think about what I’m doing I’ve got her wrapped up in a tight hug, curled downward around her smaller body and blinking back tears.

“Sweetie?” she asks, rubbing little circles across my back and tilting her head.

“I just.” A long pause. A bone-deep pain that seems to spread through my whole body. Stomp it down. Lock it up. I step back with another stock smile, running a hand through my hair. “Thanks for dinner, Mom. I better go out there and make sure Ninette don’t hurt herself.”

For all her talk about it and all of Marco’s testimonials to her talent, I’ve never actually seen my little sister throw a baseball until now. Half an hour into our game of catch, I’m sweating like a whore in church and shaking the pain out of my arm, hands stinging with the impact every time she throws the ball to me. Maybe it’s because I’m getting old, or maybe Nettie’s just superhuman, bare feet kicking up dust into the hem of her blue cotton dress as she zips back and forth across the barren yard.

“C’mon, throw it harder!” she hollers from a good distance away, bouncing on the balls of her feet and fixing me with a gap-toothed grin.

“I’m throwin’ it as hard as I can,” I wheeze, swiping my shirtsleeve across my forehead and squinting against the setting sun.

“Then you’re a _wuss_.” Giggling, she runs a tight circle around me before hopping up on the front porch, fists planted on her hips in a conqueror’s stance. “Marco threw a fastball from this here porch all the way over ‘til it smacked into the side of the Carolinas’ house the other day.”

“Aw, he did not.”

“Right hand to God, he did!”

“Ain’t no one ever told you that big fish stories don’t get you nowhere?” I grin crookedly, jumping up behind her and poking her in the ticklish spots on her sides.

Ninette shrieks and smacks at my arm, snatching the baseball out of my hand with an indignant huff. “I’ll show you a big fish story, you goon.”

Her eyes narrow in concentration, a skinny little arm rearing back. I’m about to tell her to save herself the humiliation when she snaps her whole body forward, the ball leaving her hand in a white blur and arcing across the front lawn. Light travels faster than sound, but the ball disappears into a cloud of dust as it nears our neighbor’s house about eighty feet away. A fraction of a second, Ninette’s face still set in determination.

_Thwack!_

“I’ll be goddamned,” I whisper, jaw slack as Nettie vaults over the porch railing with a gleeful squeal and goes sprinting after the ball. She comes back practically dancing, a smirk slanted across her face as she stops at the bottom of the steps, throwing the ball repeatedly into her gloved hand. “Where’d you learn to do that?”

“Just sorta know how, I reckon,” she shrugs, sitting down on the edge of the porch and letting her dirty feet swing back and forth above the ground. “And Marco’s been helpin’ me practice.”

“Has he?” Something’s stuck in my throat again, heavy and hot as it cuts off my breath. If Ninette notices, she doesn’t say anything.

“Yup! And I’m gettin’ real good at the ukulele too! Marco says that if I don’t grow up to pitch in the major leagues, I can be a canary at a jazz bar!”

So it’s not just me. I’m not sure whether or not to find it a comfort, that Marco’s got a way of putting big dreams in people’s heads and making them believe that they’re possible. I wonder if those dreams will stick with Ninette, if she’ll start to feel as choked and trapped in all this dusty despair as I do. I don’t even know what to hope for, be it her finding her contentment where she is or going on to bigger and better things.

Don’t guess I’ll be around to see how it plays out, anyhow.

“Hey, Nettie,” I mumble, sitting down beside her. My hands settle on her bony shoulders, turning her around until she’s looking at me instead of the winding path of the dirt road leading back into town. “You know how special you are, right?”

“What’s eatin’ you?” she snorts, rolling her eyes.

“No, I mean it.” It’s a bad decision to say anything out of the ordinary, especially when my sister’s shown herself more than once to be the most perceptive person in my family, but the idea of leaving her without even a semblance of a goodbye makes me feel sick. “I love you more than anything in this big ol’ mudball of a world, kiddo. I wanna make sure you know that.”

Something apprehensive flashes in eyes the same shade as mine, a brief moment of fear and uncertainty before she sets her jaw and punches me in the shoulder, grumbling, “I love you too, knucklehead. Now get off me ‘fore I turn into a sissy like you.”

Mom calls her in to get washed up for bed after that, and I retreat to my room, stretching across my still-made blankets and listening to the rising chorus of crickets outside my window. The sky grows darker. The house grows still, only the occasional creak of the old wood settling on its foundation. My watch ticks out a weary heartbeat, eight-forty-five, nine, nine-fifteen.

I grab my bags and slip out the window so I don’t have to remember walking out the door.

It’s a tense few minutes fumbling around in the dark, piling my things into the truck and praying that the engine picks tonight to start up quietly. It doesn’t, but Mom and Ninette have slept through so many mornings of me leaving for work that it makes no difference, the house slumbering even as my headlight illuminate the dust motes in front of them as I pull out into the road.

And this is it. I switch gears and pull away and leave everything I’ve ever known behind.

I wish I could say I don’t look back, that I don’t cry like a baby all the way into West Dallas. But if honesty with myself is to be my undoing, it only makes sense to take the ugly truths along with the ones that are pulling me out into the horizon and Marco’s arms.

So I admit it to myself. I look back. I cry. It is what it is.

The stretch of road outside the garage is creepy this time of night, long shadows of storefronts crisscrossing the road and the mournful howl of the wind rising up from the narrow spaces between empty buildings. My watch says nine-forty-five. Fifteen minutes.

In those fifteen minutes, I do my very best to talk myself out of this. I give myself every reason I should stay, open my bag and stare at Mom and Nettie’s faces behind a gritty pane of glass, pace the sidewalk in front of the main door until my heels ache. I try to be the person I’m expected to be, a good brother, a good son, a good human being, but no amount of self-loathing can make me take my car keys back out of my pocket. Maybe I’m more selfish than I thought.

Ten o’clock rolls around, and the road stays just as empty, little tornadoes of dust swirling up around my feet. Marco’s late.

Ten-fifteen, and my stomach starts to feel like it’s filled with lead.

Ten-forty-five, and I’m fighting back the urge to scream.

Eleven o’clock, and I lean back against the door and let a chain of disbelieving sobs rip upwards out of my throat.

He left. I made my decision too late, and he left.

All of that talk, all of those promises and stories and the way his smile shifted when he looked at me, and I’m something so easily left-behind that he didn’t even bother waiting until ten to get out of town. Was it because he thought I wouldn’t change my mind? Did he not give enough of a damn in the first place to bother wasting his time waiting around? What sort of fool have I been to ever think that this could end happily?

The only happy endings I’ve seen are on paper. Alice came out of Wonderland to find that it was all a dream, but that realization was so much softer than this, so much easier than feeling like I’m bleeding out all over the empty street, all my dreams, my _plans_ that I never even bothered to make until now draining from me in the realization that I never had a chance at being anything but ordinary.

Guess my old man was right on at least one thing. Life ain’t a fairytale.

A sharp thud rises up from the alley next to the garage, seconds passing before a silhouette rounds the corner. Without the streetlights it’s just a shadow, messy hair, broad shoulders. Relief shakes out all of the tension held in my body, rising over me like a tide as I scramble to my feet and wipe hurriedly at my cheeks.

“Christ, sweetheart, you scared the shit outta me,” I sigh, not knowing or caring where the endearment comes from, the only instinct in my mind the one that’s telling me to get to Marco and kiss him so hard that it drives any possibility of leaving me behind away from him forever.

“Sorry. I ain’t Prince Charming,” Eren grumbles out of the darkness, grabbing my arm and tugging me towards the door. “Get inside. We need to talk.”

And it all comes crashing down again.

I stand numb, an island with waves eroding my edges as Eren unlocks the door and drags me into the front room, his movements sharp and nervous. “You’ll wanna sit down.”

“I really don’t,” I respond, hollow, scooped out. There is nothing left of me.

“Sit _down_ , Jean.”

A bitter laugh collides with the backs of my teeth. Somewhere in my sadness I’ve found that this is all so _funny_ , so perfectly ironic. I am a great cosmic joke. This is my legacy. The people who care for me aren’t enough to fill the void of the one who doesn’t, and that’s just _grand_. “Look, Eren, whatever this little intervention is you got planned, it don’t matter--”

“I’ve been lookin’ out for your best interests since we were kids, you ass!” Eren fumes, rounding on me and looking like he’s a second away from knocking me out. “I’ve done nothing but try to do what’s best for you, Jean, so stop being a fuckin’ _child_ and _listen to me_ _for once in your life!_ ”

“It don’t matter ‘cause he left!” I hoot, leaning forward and slapping my knee, laughing until my stomach aches along with the rest of me. I can’t tell what the tears are from anymore, salty and warm on the backs of my hands as I wipe them away. “He up and left me. You should go pour yourself a drink to celebrate, Eren. You were right. He played me like a drum. You were right and I was wrong.”

“Son of a…” Hissing something unintelligible under his breath, Eren hauls me over to the door into the garage, flinging it open and flicking the lights on. “Look.”

The Model T is still parked in the corner. The keys are still on the rack. Untouched since I left.

“Trust me,” says Eren, a vein pulsing in his temple, “the _last_ thing I wanna do is talk up that bastard’s moral fiber, but I ain’t a liar. He didn’t leave you. Now will you _please_ come sit down?”

It takes a while for my weary heart and mind to process the new information, but when it finally hits home, a bolt of ice shoots straight down my spine. “Eren. What happened? Where is he?”

“Look, just come in here and take a seat, we’ll have a drink and I can--”

_“Where. Is. He.”_

Eren swallows hard, grabs at my shoulder like he’s afraid I won’t stay upright. “I thought it’d be better if you heard it from someone you know instead of seein’ it in the paper tomorrow. Marco tried to hold up Old Man Pixis’ grocery store with a fully-loaded handgun earlier this evening. No one got hurt, but there were two officers nearby. They arrested him. He’s sittin’ in the county jail right now.”

_“Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end! ‘I wonder how many miles I've fallen by this time?' Alice said aloud. ‘I must be getting somewhere near the centre of the earth.’”_

I have finally hit the bottom. Weeks of freefall, of flying, of tumbling headfirst down the rabbit-hole, and this is where it ends, curled up on the floor of the garage with Eren talking to me in murmurs I’m too broken to understand. I was supposed to get out. _We_ were supposed to get out. I had signed myself over to nothing but that one hope, and now it’s gone.

In losing him, I have lost myself.


	11. Marco

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have a [tumblr](http://southspinner.tumblr.com)
> 
> Also, check out all the [kickass fanart](http://southspinner.tumblr.com/tagged/atsit-fanart) people have made!

I don’t sleep my first night back behind bars. How can I? Even after the handcuffs come off, the restlessness seeps through my veins the moment the cell door locks behind me. The hours stretch into eternities of me pacing back and forth across dirty floors, dust crunching beneath my feet. I should be eyeing up weak points in the cell, thinking of how to get out. I should be thinking of the plan, reworking the details to compensate. I should be thinking of something, _anything_ to clean up the mess I’ve made.

Instead, I think of Jean.

Maybe it’s for the best. As far as he’ll know, I will have dropped off the face of the earth, out of his life. He’ll have his family and his job and his girl and the life he wants so much more than me. Maybe it’s leaving home all over again, and the only thing I’ll leave in my absence is a sense of peace.

Christ, what a load of bullshit. I don’t like the person I’ve become since I’ve been in Dallas. Self-pity doesn’t look good on me.

Still, that knowledge doesn’t do anything to stop the sinking feeling in the pit of my chest. I can’t tell if it’s the loss of my freedom or the loss of him that’s making everything spiral inwards - or maybe I’m just refusing to admit to myself that the loss of freedom and the loss of him have become synonymous when I wasn’t paying attention. Without him, I got reckless. When I got reckless, I got myself arrested. This is what addiction is. I made the irreparable mistake of letting Jean Kirschtein become something I needed to function normally, and this is the fallout of trying to quit him cold turkey.

So maybe it’s the close quarters of the cell, maybe it’s withdrawal symptoms. Either way, I pace. I wear a groove in the concrete floor and chain smoke every cigarette I’ve got in some futile effort to convince myself that nicotine tastes like him. I press a hand to cool cinderblock walls and feel my lungs already starting to starve for free air. I ignore the fatigue pulling heavy at my bones up to and past the point that my vision goes blurry and I swear I can hear that last _I can’t_ echoing over and over again. There’s nothing to mark the passage of time, but eventually the sound of cars outside starts to hum through the walls, the shuffles of the other prisoners waking up reverberate up and down the cell block. Morning.

I should be halfway to Chicago by now, windows down, driving through countryside that’s green and thriving instead of barren and dusty. I should be reaching down from the gearshift to grab Jean’s hand over the open stretches of road, watching the weight fall off his shoulders and his smile losing its sadness with every mile. I should be doing anything other than sitting in a county jail with a bunch of unruly drunks waiting for fate to drop an anvil on my head. Sucking in ragged breaths, I pace some more, wonder if this is what it’s like to go insane. God knows I’ve been climbing up the walls in my own head for years. This is just a bit more literal.

Little by little, the cell block starts clearing out. Angry wives and mothers show up to drag hungover husbands and sons home, cell doors clanging and rebukes flying in their wake. There’s no one coming for me. Connie’s a hundred miles away, like hell Sasha’s finally going to develop a soft spot for me to the point of bailing me out of jail, and as far as Jean knows, I left Dallas last night. The road to ruin, as it turns out, is a lonely one. I pace until my footsteps bounce around the empty hall, turning back on me until it sounds like an army’s marching around the tiny confines of my cage. The quiet isn’t doing me any favors.

Time takes on a strange amorphous quality, and in the space of minutes or hours I end up curled in on myself in a dusty corner, forehead pressed to my knees and sharp, uneven breaths washing humid warmth back across my face. There was a reason I brought Connie along with me for two years of gunsmoke and racing heartbeats. Me and my demons, we don’t get along too well when we’re left by ourselves. The things I push down come back too quickly when I have the time and solitude to think of them, rise up and drown me.

 _What the hell is_ us _, Marco?_

_Runnin’ with you was great, but I can’t do it anymore._

_Our son is dead._

My nails dig violent little half-moons into the heels of my palms where my fists are clenched too tightly, the pain not doing much to spike through the oppressive haze of everything I’ve lost, not enough to cover up the phantom ache across my back or the much more present agony roaring in the center of my chest. There’s not much point in trying to fight it, anyway. Nothing to fight for. I’ve always said that I’m nothing without my plans, but facing the reality of it guts me.

This is what I have now. Being a puppeteer in control of my own marionette limbs, piloting myself over to stretch out across the metal shelf that serves as a bed and staring up at the cracks in the ceiling.

The locked door at the end of the cell block clunks and swings open, footsteps scraping over the grit caked to the concrete. I don’t even have it in me to look up, mapping out the lines of cobwebs in the corner while the movement draws closer and someone knocks tentatively against the rusty bars of the cell door. “Mr. Bodt?”

“I’m sittin’ in a jail cell after being brought in for armed robbery; addressing me formally just comes across as patronizing,” I sigh, craning my neck upwards long enough to see a tall guy with short-cropped dark hair around my age hovering anxiously outside the cell. Suit and tie, briefcase, inherent look of unease. My head drops pack onto the bed with a dull thump and a spark of pain across my skull. “What.”

He laughs nervously. “I’m Franz Kefka? Your court-appointed attorney?”

Oh, for fuck’s sake. “They caught me with a gun in my hand. The hell do I need an attorney for?”

“It’s how the system works,” Franz Kefka the Court-Appointed Attorney shrugs, looking like he’s afraid I’m going to lunge at the bars or something when I sit up and roll my shoulders, groaning at the stiffness in my back. “Although given your situation, it’s good that you realize that there isn’t really much I can do for you with you being caught red-handed, as it were.”

“As it were,” I snort, raising an eyebrow. “You look like you’re twelve. How long you been outta law school?”

“Um… a month?”

“Fantastic.” The word comes out in a long, cynical drawl, a tension headache starting to throb behind the center of my forehead. “So, you got any idea what I’m lookin’ at?”

“Well, once you add up everything with breaking out of the McLennan County jail, the breaking and entering and auto theft charges that they’re pressing in relation to that, with another armed robbery charge…” He trails off, counting up my sins on his fingertips like they’re childhood mathematics. “Like I said, there’s not much I can do.”

“No more county jails, then. I’m going to big-boy prison, ain’t I?”

“Most likely. Your arraignment is this afternoon, and of course I’ll see what I can do, but…”

“You can’t do shit; that’s why they put you on the case,” I snap, scrubbing a hand down the side of my face and screwing my eyes shut to block it all out. “They let me off easy in Waco because I passed myself off as a dumb kid and spun up some lie about having a family to feed. They’re gonna throw the book at me this time.”

“I won’t argue with you there,” Franz Kefka grimaces, shifting his weight back and forth. He can’t wait to get out of here. Probably scared of catching delinquency like some sort of moral flu. “At any rate, I’ll see you this afternoon, I’ve got, uh… I’ve got a meeting?”

“I’ll be waitin’ with bated breath,” I deadpan in response, lying back down. Cracks in the ceiling. Cobwebs in the corner. Fading footsteps and the door closing.

I am nothing without my plans.

There’s no telling how much longer I lie there and let it all sink home, the fact that I have until this afternoon to re-evaluate, to take all these little pieces scattered around my feet and rebuild them into something I can work with. The fact that it’s impossible. I can’t make anything happen with a few hours in an empty jail and who knows how long in some high-security joint with no help and no hope of breaking out. I’m crafty and quick on my feet and a manipulative bastard, but I’m not a magician.

In the face of all this, I could swear something that feels almost like longing pulls tight at the pit of my stomach when I think about the garage and the creaky floorboards of Jean’s front porch, everything I was so ready to run from a few hours ago. Funny, how your priorities change when you’re on the cusp of losing it all. Except it’s not funny at all. The realization _burns_ , sears all the way to the core of me, and I hate it, I hate this, hate how all it took was a pair of pretty eyes and nicotine lips to warp everything I’ve ever wanted and make it seem hollow.

I hate that I caved for him. Softness looks even worse on me than self-pity.

The cell block door opens again, a flurry of movement punctuated with the clang of a billy club hitting the bars and the harsh voice of one of the two cops who brought me in. “You got a visitor.”

Lovely. Perfect. Just what I wanted right now. A witness to my ruination.

“Sasha, if you’re here to preach or gloat or whatever the hell it is, save your breath,” I hiss, staring determinedly at the ceiling and waiting for the sound of her retreat. It never comes. Growling a stream of curses under my breath, I sit up in one fluid motion, more than willing to vent my anger on her if she’s stupid enough to stick around. God knows I’ve spent enough time as Sasha Springer’s verbal punching bag that she owes me a good jab or two. “Bet you laughed hard enough to bust a gut when you found out, didn’t you, you miserable harpy--”

“Does it look like I’m laughin’ to you?” Jean says.

He looks like a ghost of himself, pale and faded with heavy, sleepless shadows beneath his eyes. My first instinct is to go to him, brush my thumbs over the prominent ridges of his cheekbones, will warmth back beneath his skin until he’s bright and laughing and _mine_ again. I stand slowly, glancing to the side to make sure that the cop who escorted him in is out of earshot, down the hall and out of our hair. I can feel my weakness for him rearing its head again, and I hate myself for it. Only a fool manages to feel contentment on the wrong side of a jail cell door. “Hey, darlin’.”

But for all of my unwanted softness, there is none of it in Jean. I’ve seen him irritated before, seen him exasperated with Eren’s nagging or how much the price of necessities tugs at his already-frayed purse strings, but I’ve never seen him _angry_ , not until now. Standing on the other side of the bars with his shoulders stiff, he looks at me with eyes that are too hard for me to even try to meet their gaze, every sharp plane of his face cast into relief by something that looks strangely like betrayal.

And who have I betrayed? He knew what he was signing up for the moment he let me kiss him over a stolen trumpet in his dusk-lit bedroom; I tell myself that repeatedly in a failed attempt to keep the guilt from rendering me useless. The only person I’ve betrayed is myself, my own goals, and all for his sake. If anyone is going to cast blame, it should be me throwing it at him. But I can’t. God help me (why would He?), I _can’t_ , not when I can almost see the hurt seeping out from beneath his skin, painting his clenched fists and staining his rumpled work shirt. The same one he had on yesterday, still buttoned up crooked from where I took it off.

The implications of that clarify in an instant and hit me in the stomach like a bag of bricks. He didn’t sleep at home. He changed his mind. He went back to the garage and waited.

Oh, darling.

“Jean,” I half-whisper, moving over to the door and slipping a hand between the bars to rest in the curve between his neck and shoulder. If anything, his anger only flares, the sort of burn that almost feels like ice at first, deceptive to the point that you don’t have time to pull your hand away before your skin is scorched and scarred.

“Don’t,” he hisses after a second, jerking away and shaking his head. “Don’t.”

My guts drop all the way to my shoes. “I never meant for this to happen. You gotta believe me, I--”

“I’m not sure what ‘this’ you’re talkin’ about,” Jean laughs bitterly, running a hand through his hair and swearing under his breath. “Me? You getting shipped off to jail again? I know damn well you already regard me as the biggest mistake you’ve made since you hit Dallas, so my guess is that you’re referring to you getting arrested for armed robbery.”

“You’re not a mistake,” I tell him.

“Bullshit.”

“Jean, _please_.” I’ve never done well with pleading, but for him I’ll make it work. I’ll beg, I’ll get on my knees and fucking grovel if that’s what it takes to make him look at me with something other than that crippling disappointment and pain written all over him right now. “Just hear me out.”

Another humorless laugh, and his arm snaps forward, a sharp slap bouncing off the concrete as he tosses a newspaper down through the bars onto the floor of the cell. Today’s date, rumpled pages, a glaring headline that reads WANTED FUGITIVE APPREHENDED IN WEST DALLAS GROCERY.

“There’s something you meant to happen,” he says, sounding so unbearably hollow that his voice almost makes my ears hurt. “I hope you’re happy. You finally got your front page write-up. Ninette’s been crying all day.”

Two words. Two little words, Marco, it’s easy, and maybe it won’t fix anything, but you owe him that much. Go on, say it. “I’m…”

But how can I be sorry when there’s a little thrill of victory sparking through my veins? How can I be sorry when I’ve been swearing for years that one day my family would look at my name in headlines and somewhere far away from them I’d laugh until my entire body ached?

I never did know how to apologize.

“Save it,” Jean snaps, both absolving me and condemning me at once. For the first time since he got here, our eyes meet for more than a second. He sucks in a deep breath that shudders outwards across his limbs, almost seeming to deflate as he slumps forward to rest his forehead against the bars, the force of his rage no longer enough to hold him upright. When he speaks again, he sounds very small. “What were you _thinking_ , Marco?”

That I’ve lost everything I’ve ever tried to hold onto and you were the newest and freshest loss on a long list. That I had something with you that I couldn’t even understand, and watching it slip away still somehow hurt more than a physical wound ever could. That I missed you before I even left. That everything I’ve ever planned seems hollow and meaningless without you, and I can’t live with myself for letting you happen to me. That if this is what I think it is, the price is too damn high, and I’ve got no idea how to steal it. That you said you were fine before me, and I was fine before you, and now neither of us are fine without each other. That you deserve better. That I should have been smarter.

That I love you, damn it all to hell, I love you, I love you, I love you and it’s ruining me.

“That I needed some cash for the road,” I shrug.

“You needed…” He trails off into a disbelieving huff, shutting his eyes tightly and letting go of the bars before he looks at me again, accusation heavy on every syllable. “I waited for you. I went home and I packed my shit and I said goodbye to my family and _I waited for you_ , sat there and thought you didn’t even give enough of a shit to let me make up my mind. And you needed some cash for the road.”

“Made sense at the time.” A horrible excuse, but the only one I have. It’s better than admitting that the loss of him drove me to recklessness. Owning up to that sort of weakness isn’t something I want to do, even if it’s to Jean. “Besides, you were talkin’ like you were gonna stay.”

“I wanted to stay,” he chokes out, twining his arms around his torso and curling forward like he’s trying to hold himself together. “I wanted to stay and be who I’m supposed to be and live my life and be _normal_ , but ever since you showed up I can’t. I can’t do it. Gettin’ outta here with you was the one shot I had at being okay, and you went and got yourself fuckin’ _locked up!_ ”

The last two words explode into a ragged shout, echoing up and down the cell block. Jean looks like he’s itching for something to punch, but he’s got enough sense of self-preservation to refrain from slamming his fist into unforgiving concrete or steel. Hell, I’d let him have one good swing at my jaw if I thought it would make him feel better, but no one ever threw a decent punch through metal bars and a scuffle would bring guards running. I’m not ready to lose my chance to talk with him frankly yet, and so I don’t suggest it.

“C’mere,” I mumble, sticking my arm out through the bars and looking at him expectantly until he steps forward and takes my hand. I try not to notice the nervousness pulling taught at his posture, try not to see how his gaze shoots worriedly down to the end of the hall, try not to think about a lost future where I could hold his hand for hours on end and kiss the sadness out of the corners of his mouth and find out what the sunrise looks like spreading warmth across his skin as he sleeps. Those possibilities are gone, nullified by bad timing and my own foolishness. What I have now is lacing our fingers together and tugging Jean closer until both of us are pressed against opposite sides of the bars, bringing my free hand up to rest against the side of his face. “I’m gonna figure something out. This is just a minor hiccup, a little bump in the plan--”

“The plan don’t exist anymore, Marco,” says Jean, chiding me like I’m some sort of slow child for thinking otherwise. His voice wavers, spreading warm across my lips as he rests his hand over mine against his cheek and grips it hard, trying to drive his point home. “There ain’t a plan that you can make in all this that’ll work. The plan is you go to jail for this, and I stay here and wait for you.”

“You’d do that?” Frowning, I pull back to get a better look at him, trying to spot the lie and not being able to find it. “You’d wait?”

“Do I have a choice?” he asks, looking so unbearably broken. That was me. I did that to him.

I have never come closer to saying ‘I’m sorry’ in my life.

Instead, I turn and press a kiss to the inside of his palm and sigh, “Yeah. You got the choice to walk outta here and pretend you never met me. You can settle down and get something going with Mikasa and probably be pretty happy if you give it enough time. Ain’t much of a life to be had here, but you could make one, if you wanted.”

“I don’t want that,” Jean says.

“Then what do you want?”

“You.”

I laugh softly against his hand and turn back so that the very tips of our noses touch, unable to get closer because of the bars. “Then you’d best be prepared for one hell of a game of tug-of-war with the Texas Department of Corrections, darlin’. I’m a popular guy.”

“And I’m patient,” he nods, jumping when something clangs down the hall and taking a quick step back. “How long were you supposed to be in jail in Waco?”

“Two years.” But I’d gotten off lucky. That won’t happen this time.

“I can wait two years. We’ll write, I’ll come visit you, two years is nothing--”

“Yeah, but that was before I busted out of jail, broke into a house, stole a car, drove to Dallas, robbed a pawnshop, and held up a grocery store, Jean.” I hate sounding so defeated, especially in the face of his newfound hope, but my talent for optimism has never been that great to begin with. “If this is what you’re gonna choose, you need to think realistically.  It could be five years. Eight years. No way to tell until this afternoon. And if I go somewhere that ain’t a hick-ass county jail, there’ll be no chance of gettin’ out early. Not with Connie locked up in Waco. Can you really sit here and wait? Is it worth it?"

"Shut up," he replies flatly, eyes narrowing to thin amber slashes as he moves forward again and reaches through the bars to grab me by the shirt and tug me back towards him. "You don't get to pull this shit. You don't get to drop into my life and turn everything inside-out and make me question myself and what I want and... and question _everything_ and then just. You don't get to stand there and try to talk me out of us. You got no right."

"I make a habit out of doing things I got no right to do," I grimace, peeling his fingers off my collar to tangle them up with my own again. His hands are bruised and fragile, the knuckles of spindly musician's fingers red and split. He's already hit something he shouldn't have. It's good to know that I'm not the only one here who's suffered a recent lapse in judgment, although mine inevitably has worse consequences than an aching hand and a broken heart.

"Yeah, and look where it landed you."

"Look, you said you wanted to get out." It's been a while since they let him back into the cell block. They'll be coming back to clear him out any minute, and there are still things that need to be said. I try to rush, stumbling over my words and feeling like something in me is splintering as I reach forward and settle my hands behind the hinges of his jaw, ensuring that he can't look away. I can't afford for him to hide right now. "And I said that I could help you get out, but the truth is, you can do it without me. You can get outta this town and head North and make it without me."

"I can't." Jean swallows heavily, features set in stubborn defiance. "And even if I could, I wouldn't want to. I've spent my whole life waiting for a chance to be something other than what people want me to be. A few more years ain't gonna make much difference."

The fact that he’s much more level-headed about all of this than I am probably has something to do with me being the one sitting in a jail cell, but I’m grateful for his steadiness nonetheless, dropping my hands to his shoulders and exhaling shakily. “I’m scared as hell.”

“I’d be worried if you weren’t.” A hand slips through the bars to press against the shirt and skin covering my frantically pounding heart, thin fingers resting between my ribs like they were made to fit there. It helps. “I know this whole situation’s shit. But I’m in it with you. And I ain’t going nowhere, whatever consolation that might be.”

“Even though your mom’s probably horrified and your sister won’t stop crying?”

“Mom’s horrified at a lot of things, and trust me, Nettie’ll be more than capable of handing down her personal punishment the next time you see her,” he laughs, his palm skating up over my chest to reach up and lace fingers absently through my hair, ignoring my little grumble of protest that it’s probably too grungy for human contact. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. One day at a time.”

“Days seem awful long when you live ‘em like that,” I hum, leaning unconsciously into his touch. How long will I have to go without it? How many years of nothing but coded letters and supervised visits and weighted looks? I want to kick myself for every time I could’ve held him but didn’t, for taking so long to make a move in the first place. A week or so of stolen kisses won’t last years. He says that he’ll wait now, but I’ve seen too many sad men leave prison to go home to empty houses where someone who made them the same promise once lived. What little I know of love is limited to Jean, but I know that memories are tricky things, that what goes out of sight soon goes out of mind. If - when - I’m gone, he’ll start to forget one good week in the face of innumerable bad ones. This will fade.

I’ll fade. The idea’s always made me feel sick, but now it makes me feel like my heart’s about to stop.

“We’re gonna get outta here someday,” he says, and there’s such conviction in it, all the fervor of the faith my parents always had in their Bibles and hymns that I could never seem to find. “Just like you said. You and me, the sky’s the limit, the world’s our oyster and all that shit.”

“Is that really what you want?” I ask.

“I wanna not feel like I’m walkin’ on eggshells just to live.” This is not the Jean of a month ago, a week ago, of yesterday morning, running from himself for the sake of normalcy. Maybe he’s putting on a brave face for my sake, or maybe it just took me getting thrown in prison to make him realize that life’s too short to live it for other people’s comfort, but either way, he sounds stronger. There’s no tremor to his voice anymore, he doesn’t try to look away or hide or skate around what he’s trying to say. I think, for the first time, I’m seeing Jean at the full extent of who he is rather than who he’s expected to be.

And God, he’s beautiful.

“I wanna get in a car with you and drive until we’re somewhere that ain’t all dust and dirt anymore,” he says, thumbs brushing across my temples and the ghost of a hopeful smile tugging at the edges of his mouth. “I wanna take my trumpet into grimy hole-in-the-wall jazz bars and play for shitty tips and fall asleep with you on a creaky motel mattress and wake up the next morning and decide where we’re headed next. I wanna get the hell outta Dallas and the hell outta Texas and never come back, even if I have to wait a while to leave. I want you even if it means waiting and I wanna make enough money to give my family the life they should have and I want a life where I actually feel _alive_ and I really, _really_ wanna kiss you right now.”

He is so, so beautiful.

“Better make it a good one, darlin’,” I whisper, taking one last look to make sure the coast is clear. “It’s liable to be the last one you get for a long time.”

It’s awkward and slightly painful with the bars in the way, but even despite that, I don’t think anything compares to Jean yanking me forward until we’re as close as it’s possible to get and crushing his lips to mine, bruising and almost frantic in his urgency. I’ve kissed plenty of people. I’ve done plenty of things with plenty of people, to be honest, but I’ve never been kissed like I mattered. Like the last breath of air in the world was tucked away inside my lungs and I was the only chance at life left in a barren existence. I’ve never been that for someone, never had the chance to be a saving grace when I was too busy being an agent of destruction, but Jean holds me like I’m something worth keeping, and I curse myself for the tightness that tugs at my throat when his fingertips trace the tendons in my neck and slide down to my shoulders, holding me in place and wordlessly saying _stay, stay with me, you mean something._

All the striving for headlines and history books, all the pain and scars and nightmares, and that’s all I’ve wanted for four years and however long before that.

I wanted to mean something.

The dooknob at the end of the hall turns, and we both pull back, breathing heavily and watching each other through the bars.

“I’ll wait,” Jean says again, trying and failing to be inconspicuous as he wipes the shine from his kiss-swollen lips on his shirtsleeve.

“Come to the courthouse this afternoon,” I almost choke on the words, clinging to the bars and watching him slowly step backwards, making the distance seem normal. “I can’t do this alone, Jean, I can’t…”

“I’ll be there. I promise.” That’s all he can get out before he’s being escorted back the hallway towards the door, looking over his shoulder with every step.

“Bye, darlin’,” I whisper as the door shuts behind him.

Me and my demons, we don’t get along too well when we’re left by ourselves. And the moment it sinks in just how alone I am in the empty cell block, just how alone I’ll be in a different cell on a different day for God only knows how long, they all come out to play.

When they come to get me for my arraignment, I’m a blubbering mess in the corner, too far gone to even feel ashamed.

* * *

The Dallas County courthouse is much bigger and much ritzier than any I’ve ever been hauled into in handcuffs before, but the grandeur is kind of lost in the sinking, sick feeling I get when I’m dragged out of the back of a police car to a crowd of people watching me with owlish, disbelieving eyes. People I met while fixing their cars at the garage. Eren, who’s looking at me like I’m something that crawled out from under a rock, not too different than the usual expression of disgust. Mikasa, still in her nurse’s uniform, who just looks sad for some reason. I don’t even spot Jean in all the clamor until I’m almost inside. He’s been home since he left the jail, shaved and changed and gotten all pointlessly dolled up for the sole purpose of watching me get shipped off to prison.

Fucking rich kids, man.

The inside of the courthouse has the same quiet, solemn atmosphere of a church, which doesn’t make me feel any more comfortable about the situation. The last thing I need is to associate my surroundings with an entire childhood of aching knees on a hard wood kneeling bench begging God to absolve the sinful nature of my existence and wondering if praying hard enough would change me. It wasn’t until I was older that I started to wonder if there was even anyone up there listening, a few more years before I decided that if there was, he certainly had bigger things to worry about than who I wanted to fuck. I swear I can almost hear creaking pews and warbly organ music as I’m led down a wide hallway and into a courtroom, shoved into a chair beside Franz Kefka, the world’s worst court-appointed attorney.

A weary-looking judge trundles in, and everyone rises in unison. Almost liturgical.

Bless me, father, for I have sinned, and everyone here knows it.

I look over my shoulder as a low, droning voice reads down a long list of charges, scanning faces until I find Jean’s. He smiles tightly, the motion not quite reaching his eyes, mouths _I’m right here_ , and I wish that the reassurance made it easier to breathe. Fraz Kefka elbows me in the ribs, hissing at me to turn around, and I do so reluctantly.

There is no clever loophole here. I haven’t been given an out. The only option is to play the game and play it well.

The judge harrumphs and flips through some papers before looking up at me. “Son, I don’t believe I’ve seen a kid your age get into this much trouble in my natural life.”

“I seem to have a talent for it, Your Honor,” I reply, trying very hard to reign in the smirk that wants to come out with it.

“That you do. Any particular reason you decided to escape from prison, steal a car, and hold up a grocery store?”

Because I’m a dead man walking who wants to stick it to my parents for denying my existence, all while becoming infamous, robbing the countryside blind, and hitting the road with my lover, who happens to be your friendly local mechanic.

“I had a very troubled childhood, Your Honor.” Yeah. That about covers it.

“And apparently a troubled adulthood. One that I fully intend to nip in the bud,” the judge rumbles, looking down at his papers again. “And so, for one count of prison escape, one count of breaking and entering, one count of auto theft, and two counts of armed robbery, you are hereby sentenced to serve sixteen years at Eastham prison farm.”

Everything tunnels inward, and I can’t make sense of my surroundings anymore.

Sixteen years.

It took me eight years to realize what I was, another two to realize what it meant and the secrets I’d have to keep.

Sixteen years.

It took a year and a half for the wounds on my back to fully heal. They kept getting infected because there was nowhere for me to lie down and rest long enough to let them knit themselves together, tearing them open anew every time I had to move my arms too much.

Sixteen years.

It took me a month to fall in love with Jean Kirschtein, only to wind up turning around in a numb haze in the middle of a courtroom to watch him collapse, Eren holding him up with gritted teeth and frantic murmurs into his ear.

Sixteen years at Eastham prison farm.

And now my religious crisis is solved. There has to be a God, and this has to be his way of punishing me, because this is nothing short of heavenly architecture. It’s nothing if not divine humor, the irony of the fact that I served sixteen years of hell on one farm just to run away and end up serving sixteen years on another.

_But the eyes of the wicked will fail, and escape will elude them; their hope will become a dying gasp…_

_We raised you better! You know better!_

_Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts…_

_I didn’t give birth to an abomination._

It took me sixteen years to die the first time. I wonder how long it will take now.

It’s not under my control, a little tickle that starts in my chest and spreads outwards in icy tendrils, constricting around my throat. Back in handcuffs, lead around the table and towards the aisle. I start chuckling.

Sixteen years at Eastham prison farm. A giggle slips out between my gritted teeth, a manic grin stretching at my lips until my whole face hurts.

Sixteen years until I can kiss Jean again.

The peals of hysterical laughter rend my throat as they claw their way up out of my lungs, each and every sound painful. I can’t breathe, tears of psychotic mirth streaming down my cheeks as I double over, clutching at my stomach. I’d throw up if I could stop laughing long enough to do it. It takes two cops to haul me out of the courtroom, looping grips under my arms and dragging me backwards so my heels scrape across the carpet. I’m laughing too hard to walk.

I catch sight of Jean just before we get out the door, muffling sobs into his hand and watching me with a look of utter horror. It’s worth a shot. Not like anyone else will understand what it means. The ravings of a madman. Maybe that’s all my love is after all.

“How long can you wait, darlin’?!” I cackle, tears swimming too thick for me to make out anything but him anymore. “Just how long can you wait?!”

He doesn’t say anything. Of course he doesn’t. But his face says enough in the seconds before the courthouse door shuts in my face.

It says, _Not sixteen years._

I laugh up to and past the point that they throw me in the back of a transport car and send me up the road, curled up on a cold metal floor and howling with everything I’ve got in me, because there’s nothing else left for me to do. I’ve read poems about the world ending in fire or ice, with a bang or a whimper. Mine ends in loud bursts of sobbing laughter. It’s all gone.

I am nothing without my plans.

I am nothing without him.

I am nothing without…

I am nothing.

 

 


	12. Jean

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have a [tumblr ](http://southspinner.tumblr.com)  
> Also, check out all the [kickass fanart](http://southspinner.tumblr.com/tagged/atsit-fanart) people have made!
> 
> ALSO. THIS IS IMPORTANT. IF YOU ARE IN ANY WAY TRIGGERED BY MILD IMPLICATIONS AND MENTIONS OF PHYSICAL/SEXUAL ABUSE, PLEASE TREAD WARILY THIS CHAPTER. THANK YOU. STAY SAFE, FRIENDS.

The first letter shows up after two weeks.

It’s an afterthought, a casual mention over dinner, not the slightest hint of tension in Mom’s voice when she mentions that I got something in the mail. A battered envelope, my name in stark, bold handwriting. She asks who it’s from. I tell her it’s a bill.

At two o’clock in the morning, I end up on the front porch of the old caretaker’s cottage that Eren rents on his parents’ ranch outside of town, clutching the rumpled paper in a white-knuckled grip. He shakes his head and waves me inside, shoves a drink in my hand before I realize he’s poured it. I’ve been self-medicating since the courthouse, showing up to work smelling like a distillery and nursing persistent headaches, but he’s at least had the grace to not say anything about it until now. But, since it’s Eren, my grace period is bound to run out.

“You’re a mess,” he snaps, snatching the envelope from me with a glare and stalking across the living room to grab some of the shitty whiskey he keeps under the sink for himself.

“Wouldn’t you be?” I ask, empty, voice and features flat. I don’t have to bother putting on a show for him the way I do with Mom and Ninette and Mikasa. He’s seen the fallout firsthand.

“He’s _gone_ , Jean,” Eren groans, rubbing a hand over his forehead like he’s trying to make a child understand something that goes far over their head. “He’s gonna be locked up tight in that prison for a long time, and good fuckin’ riddance. You can’t sit around and beat your head against a wall for sixteen years; even _your_ thick skull will cave in from that. You gotta live your life.”

I snatch the whiskey and the unopened envelope back from him with an angry snarl, taking a slug right out of the bottle and relishing the burn slipping down my throat because at least it feels like _something_. “You can say that easy enough. Your life ain’t drivin’ you up the walls. I wouldn’t expect you to get it.”

“Oh, _poor baby._ ” He looks like he’s got half a mind to hit me, and I’ve got half a mind to let him. Historically, he’s been the only person capable of knocking any sense into me, and God knows I could use some right now. “Poor little Jean missed his chance at runnin’ away, and now he’s sulking ‘cause his half-baked, reckless, _illegal_ plans didn’t pan out. I get it well enough.”

“It ain’t about runnin’ away, and you know it.”

“No, it’s about _him_ ,” Eren laughs bitterly, and I don’t have it in me to yell that he has a name. I haven’t been able to say it myself for weeks. Even thinking it burns. “You’re so goddamn naive.”

“Don’t fuckin’ patronize me,” I hiss, landing a solid shove in the center of his chest and pushing him out of my personal space. The last thing I want him to see are his words hitting home.

But he comes right back in for the kill, shoving me back and taking the bottle that I’ve already mostly drained out of my drunkenly slack grip. “Oh, is tellin’ the truth patronizing, now?! You thought that you found someone on a white horse to take you away from your problems, and you’re upset because you found out that he ain’t anything close. That’s your problem, Jean, you’re a grown-ass man and you still wanna look at life like it’s some kinda story book…”

“You sound like my dad,” I chuckle darkly.

“Fuck you.” For all the venom in Eren’s voice, I don’t miss the wounded look that flashes across his face, there and gone in an instant. “All I’m tryin’ to say is that it’s possible to fall in love with the idea of a person. You’ve always been in love with gettin’ outta here; we all used to be. But that was just shit we spouted when we were in school. Sometimes real life just means learning to love what you have instead of what you can never get.”

My stomach churns, either from the booze or from his words hitting all my weak points. “You think that’s what this is? Me being in love with an idea?”

“I know that’s what it is.”

“You can’t possibly know--”

“For Christ’s sake, _let it end!_ ” Eren shouts, darting forwards and tugging me into a brief, inebriated scuffle that ends up with him panting on the other side of the living room holding the envelope and nursing a freshly bruised jaw. Grimacing, he looks down at the heavy-handed ink and dog-eared paper, back up to me. “Just let it be over. He pulled the wool over your eyes, you believed him, and I ain’t gonna blame you for that. But sittin’ here and trying to drink yourself to death over a letter you ain’t even opened is something I’m gonna hold you accountable for; sorry for caring about you enough to do it! Hell, it’s probably him trying to con you into doing something to help him out. If you just ignore it and move on, he’ll stop.”

“What if I don’t wanna move--” I start, cut off mid-sentence by Eren ripping the envelope open and yanking out the thin sheet of paper inside. “What the _fuck_ , Eren?!”

Eren’s eyes dart back and forth over the lines of text, scanning quickly. I’m halfway across the room when he shakes his head, pulls a cigarette lighter out of his pocket, and sends the whole letter up in a plume of flame, dropping it into the umbrella stand next to the front door to let it burn out.

The most awful, broken noise I’ve ever heard myself produce croaks out of my throat, and I go boneless, slumping down on the couch and watching the smoke and orange glow radiate from the umbrella stand until nothing but a few scraps of ash floating on the updraft remain. Eren walks over to kneel down in front of me, and I can’t even muster the willpower to hit him, staring blankly in front of me and feeling the room start to spin. I got too drunk too fast. It’s only a matter of time before I keel over unconscious.

Warm, callused hands settle on either side of my flushed face, and I pretend they’re someone else’s until Eren’s raspy tenor shatters the illusion, the familiarity of it cutting through the haze over my brain. “ _Let it end,_ Jean. For everyone else’s sake if not for your own. You got people here that need you, people here that lo-... We can’t watch you do this to yourself. You get another letter, you do what I just did. You throw it out, you burn it, rip it into bits, I don’t care. Don’t read it. Don’t write back. Let him go.”

“Let him go,” I echo numbly, feeling an ache bloom in my chest at the words.

“He ain’t good for you,” Eren says, hands shaking slightly as he pulls back and stands up again. “This, what you got here, this is what’s best for you. This is who you are.”

“Who I have to be.” Strangely, I feel almost like laughing. Eren’s giving me the same talk I gave myself for years. Stomp it down. Lock it up. Settle for contentment if not happiness.

He reaches down to give my shoulder a squeeze, mumbles something, but I’m too drunk and dizzy to make it out. The next thing I process is a balled-up blanket hitting my head from the other side of the room, the hall light clicking off as Eren heads back to bed. “Sleep on the couch, dumbass. If you wrapped your truck around a lamppost on the way home and died, I’d get behind at the shop.”

I eventually fall asleep, but not until I spend endless stretches of time in the darkness curled up in a ball on the couch, trying to remember how to breathe as I sob out a whispered mantra of “Let him go, let him go, let him go.”

If that’s what it takes to not feel like I’m drowning with every passing second, I’ll do it.

I’ll let him go.

* * *

Another letter shows up a week later. I sit in my room with a spare lunch pail and a box of matches, determined to follow through with the promise I’ve made to myself. It takes letting four matches in a row burn down to the point they scorch my fingers before I realize that maybe I’m not as good at letting go as I’d convinced myself I would be. I don’t open it. I don’t look for more than a second at my name in his handwriting for fear of remembering what his voice sounds like wrapped around it. I shove the sealed envelope in my trumpet case and shove it under my bed. Out of sight, out of mind. It can’t take too long for “out of heart” to follow.

Another week, another letter. Reeling, I choke on my breath until my trumpet case slams shut on top of it, decide to keep busy to take my mind off of the ache rising in the marrow of my bones. I ask Nettie if she wants to go out and play catch. She storms back the hallway with teary eyes and slams her bedroom door so hard the whole house shakes.

A week after that, I’m the one who goes out to the mailbox, knowing what to expect. I call Eren and ask if he needs me for an overtime shift. He doesn’t, but I think he must hear the desperation in my voice, decide that me holding onto my sanity is worth a little of his money.

Weeks. Letters. Ninette goes back to school at the beginning of September, rides out with me in the morning and sits on the workbench in the garage after she gets out of class. Eren starts teaching her about cars, letting her bring him different tools and parts, and one afternoon she laughs for the first time in a month as he lifts her up over the open hood of a car and lets her turn a bolt the wrong way, dousing them both in a spray of motor oil. At home, my trumpet case barely latches anymore, paper corners sticking out the seam of the lid. I re-stack them carefully and bind them with rubber bands. They fit more neatly once I’ve got them condensed and shoved into the darkest corner I can find.

The new ones are carefully filed, stored in chronological order. The hospital throws a big benefit gala, and even though It’s been ages and I’m out of practice, I knock back a few too many glasses of champagne and convince Mikasa to give me one dance when the band starts playing Benny Goodman. She laughs when I twirl her around and then blames the lapse in her stoicism on being punch-drunk, kisses my cheek and wanders off to talk to some of the other nurses. I smile for the first time in what feels like an eternity.

One letter a week. It becomes part of my routine, a little weekly reminder of what I could have had that hurts until I tuck it away. It’s almost symbolic, gives me something tangible to hold, a real little box of secrets to hide away and dissociate from myself.

Four months after Eren burns the first one, they stop coming.

I don’t allow myself to think about what that means, shove my trumpet case even further under my bed and throw myself into work and helping Nettie with her homework and taking Mikasa out a few times a week, try my best to sink down in the life I’ve built for myself so I can stop floating towards the light that’s growing dimmer and more distant by the day. They say that drowning is the most painful way to die there is, at first, but after a moment the body relaxes and it’s actually quite peaceful, drifting off in the cool quiet beneath the waves. At the beginning, I told myself I would let him go because I felt like I was drowning in my fight to hold on. Now, I’m just waiting impatiently for the water to fill up my lungs and drag me down.

I want complacency. I want my scripted life and the predictable security that comes with it. I want it because I’ve proven to myself that I can’t have anything else.

Over Thanksgiving dinner, Mom asks me if I’ve put any thought into saving up money for a ring. I choke on a mouthful of potatoes and Ninette laughs.

Of course, I tell her, thinking of how much of a better liar I’ve become now that the biggest lie I’ve ever told is stuffed under my bed and everything else pales in comparison. Of course I’ve been thinking about it. Just testing the waters.

Just waiting for the right time to breathe them in.

* * *

December in Texas isn’t cold. If anything, it’s the closest thing to pleasant weather we get, the stifling air of summer cooling off to being simply arid, gentle breezes that blow ever-changing shapes into the dunes of dust. Almost a month since my last letter, and I try to keep from counting the days, tell myself that I’ve finally let it end, that this is the part where I’m supposed to feel grounded. Forget that most nights I wake up breathless, feeling like I’m in freefall with two syllables clinging to my lips that sear like fire running down my throat.

My family ends up over at the Jaegers’ for Christmas luncheon - the first time I’ve had _luncheon_ apply to any of my meals since I was living in a mansion downtown - the parents sitting inside talking amongst themselves while the rest of us escape from the table as quickly as possible to get outside. Eren chases Nettie around the dried-up remnants of a yard between the house and the barn, the two of them kicking up clouds of dust and Nettie letting out a shriek when Eren catches her around the waist and throws her over his shoulder, hollering something about it being his job to catch ornery Kirschteins and put them in their place.

“Your mother’s gonna skin those two both alive when she sees the state of Ninette’s dress,” Mikasa hums almost boredly, stretched out across the porch swing with her head in my lap, high heels dangling gracefully off her toes where her ankles stretch over the opposite armrest.

“Trust me, she’s got cleaning Nettie’s dresses down to a science,” I laugh, running a hand absently through her silky hair and watching Eren turn my sister loose just to give her a five-second head start and take off after her again. I wish this could all feel as peaceful as it’s supposed to, but it’s a start. I’m trying.

Her hand comes up and presses against my jawline, turning my head until I’m looking back down at her. “You seem happy. Happier.”

“Is that so strange that it merits commentary?”

“I guess,” Mikasa shrugs, running the pad of her thumb across my cheekbone before letting her hand drop back to rest on her stomach, still watching me carefully. “Not so long ago, you looked empty. Like your body was here but the rest of you was somewhere else. And there’s still something missing now, but… you seem happier, Jean. And I’m glad. That’s all.”

“Guess I finally came to terms with who I’m supposed to be,” I tell her, trying not to let that soft _there’s still something missing_ wake up the carefully compacted truth in the hollow of my chest. There’s still something missing, and part of me knows that putting a ring on her finger won’t fix it, part of me knows that a lie can only be lived for so long and that my heart can never fully learn to rest here, I know, I _know_ , but I’ve been trying. I’ll keep trying, even if it means skating around truths I’m not even sure I know and--

“Do you love me?” I ask before I’m even sure of what I’m saying, watching Ninette sucker-punch Eren so hard that he drops her and she takes off running again.

Mikasa blinks.

“Not really, no,” she says, reaching up and ghosting delicate fingertips across my forehead, sweeping my messy hair to the side. “At least, not in the way you’re asking me if I do. But it’s never been about us loving each other, Jean, I think we both know that.”

“Do we?”

“I think you do. You just don’t wanna admit it.” Mikasa looks an awful mixture of weary and sad, eyes so dark that I can see my own reflection in them. She sighs softly, grabbing my hand. “And I think that you don’t realize.”

I frown and ask her, “Realize what?”

“The effect that you have on people,” she replies, the corner of her mouth quirking upwards. “Back in school, you ran that pack of boys, Armin and Samuel and the rest of them. And you never saw it, how they all looked at you. You could have convinced them to do anything.”

“Bah,” I snort, shaking my head. I’ve never been any sort of leader. I’m too busy trying to figure out whether I want to keep my head above water or let the waves drag me down.

“No, really.” With a little huff of effort, Mikasa sits up, brushing her skirt into place and combing out the tangles I unintentionally caused by playing with her hair. “When she thought we weren’t around to hear, Carla would always say, ‘Thank God that Kirschtein boy is a good kid. He could tell Eren to jump off a bridge and he’d take a flying leap.’ And he would have. He still would. That’s what you don’t realize. I don’t think you’ve ever seen the extents that people will go to for you.”

“I don’t understand what this has to do with us,” I admit, deciding that at least here, honesty is the best policy.

“No,” says Mikasa, watching Eren kneel down to help Nettie brush the dust off her dress. “No, I don’t suppose you do. But that’s all right. You don’t have to.”

“So, does this mean you wanna break things off, or…”

“On the contrary.” Shaking her head, she stands up, sliding gracefully back into her heels and leaning down to give me a brisk kiss on the cheek. “Carla and your mom both want a June wedding. I think that sounds lovely.”

I spend the entire drive home turning the conversation over and over in my head, and I still can’t figure out what she meant.

“Oh, Jean, sweetie,” Mom flags me down before I can retreat into my room, standing on tiptoe to swipe dust off my collar and smiling serenely. “You got something in the mail yesterday, I forgot to tell you, I was in such a rush getting everything wrapped. It’s on the counter.”

My heart goes leaden, drops into my feet and out through the soles of my shoes and plummets down to the center of the earth. Not now. Not this.

I move into the kitchen like I’m in a dream, shaking fingers turning the envelope over. My name and address, the same handwriting, but this time it’s sharp and wobbly, as if written by a shaking hand.

“Honey? What is it?”

“Christmas card from the Arlerts,” I choke, the lie bitter in my mouth. “They say California’s beautiful and they send their love. I’m… I’ll be in my room.”

Nothing short of a miracle allows me to make it to my bedroom and shut the door behind me before I’m curled up in the center of my bed wheezing, everything I’ve let settle rearing back up and looming over me. It never left. I just taught myself to ignore it. My whole body shakes like the last autumn leaf clinging desperately to its branch.

“Put it away,” I whisper to myself. The handwriting is so different. He was shaking as hard as I am now when he wrote it.

“Just put it away.” Two months of nothing, and now this. “Put it away, put it away, put it--”

The sharp rip of the top of the envelope sounds like gunfire in the silence of my room, the rattle of the paper inside the thunder heralding an oncoming storm. Mikasa was right. There’s still something missing, and I feel it slide into place the moment I see a shaky _Dear Jean_ at the top of the page.

> _I know that you don’t owe me anything. You’ve got more right than most to hate me for all of this. I tried not to be too sad when you didn’t write back because I knew what I’d done, knew that you probably wouldn’t want to have anything to do with me._
> 
> _You’re the last person I should be asking for a favor, but I’m out of options._
> 
> _I know I’ve asked before, and that the answer’s probably still no, but I need to see you. If you could just come down to Eastham on a weekend sometime soon, just give me five minutes, that’s all I ask for. I’m not even asking anymore. I’m begging._
> 
> _Please. If we ever had anything that meant something to you, please come. This is my last-ditch effort. Whether or not you show up, I won’t bother you again._
> 
> _I don’t expect you to forgive me. But you’re a better person than I am. I hope that means I’ll see you soon._
> 
> _-M_

“What the hell,” I whisper, staring down at the words scratched out by his trembling hand for long, oppressively quiet minutes. “What the hell.”

Something’s wrong. I feel it in every particle of myself.

“Mom!” I shout, shoving the paper under my pillow and sticking my head out into the hallway.

“Yes?”

“Today was Friday, right?”

“Yes, why?”

“No reason,” I respond softly, looking at the edge of my trumpet case sticking out from under my bed. “I’ve just got the day off tomorrow, is all.”

I spend that night dreaming about being underwater, clawing my way to the surface. I have never wanted to drown. A peaceful death still means you’re dead in the end, and I swore to him that I wanted to live.

* * *

It’s a long, dusty drive from Dallas to Eastham prison farm. My truck nearly gives up and dies twice on the way down, I get lost three times, and the sky looks dark and threatening like there’s a dust storm brewing. It seems like every force of nature and fate is trying to keep me from getting there, and that only puts me more on edge.

Mom thinks I’m with Mikasa, Mikasa is covering for me to both her family and mine, and I’m facing down the prospect of being stranded on the side of the road two hours from home in a dead truck. I’ve played worse odds before.

After a long session of staring at a map in a gas station, I manage to find the right road, winding down thin packed-dirt paths until I see the first of the guard towers poking over the horizon. This place means business. The fields that make up the farm part of the prison farm are barren, would be in December even if we weren’t in the middle of the worst drought in known history, the perimeters fenced in and crowned with deadly-looking razor wire. Guard towers everywhere, officers with rifles pacing back and forth inside of them. Long, squat buildings, bars on windows. The whole place reeks of despair.

God, he’s been here for five months. He’ll be here for sixteen years. My stomach turns at the thought.

I park outside a door marked ‘reception’ in peeling paint, wander inside feeling terribly out of place. A fat cop sitting with his heels kicked up on a desk looks up from his newspaper, dropping the donut he’s halfway finished eating once he gets a good look at me. “I’ll be goddamned. You actually showed up.”

“Uh…” I start, shifting nervously back and forth. “Was I supposed to be here sooner?”

“Weedy kid with blonde hair, drives an old clunker of a truck, answers to Jean?” Caught off-guard, I stammer and tilt my head to the side. The cop just laughs. “Son, he’s been tryin’ to get you down here since August. Come on back.”

Since August. All those unopened letters in my trumpet case back home, and each one has been another plea for me to come here. I feel sick.

“You’re his brother-in-law, right? Live up ‘round Dallas with his older sister?” The cop asks conversationally, like the grime and anguish around him has no effect. An ancient metal grate clunks and creaks on its hinges as he unlocks it, leading me from the administrative area into what looks like the actual prison, empty cells down one hallway and what looks to be an infirmary down another. He doesn’t have any older sisters, but I just nod numbly, trying not to choke on the stench of sweat and rust. The cop just keeps babbling, oblivious. “Normally we’ve got a room for supervised visits, but he ain’t gonna get up to no shenanigans with the state he’s in. Hell, you’ll be lucky to get two words outta him. Nah, you just wander on back to that door when you’re done and someone’ll escort you out.”

“Okay.”

He stops for a moment, gives me a sidelong glance. “You ain’t never been in a prison in your life, have you, kid?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, it goes without sayin’ that we ain’t got the most savory types here,” he grimaces, hunching forward to unlock another door. “Just keep your head down and don’t make eye contact. We’ve got him in a cell down around the corner, so once you run the gauntlet you should be fine.”

“Wait, hold on, what gauntlet--”

The door swings open, and I don’t get time to finish asking the question, following orders and gluing my eyes to the floor as I move forward. It’s noisy, the sound of slamming metal and clashing voices, but I try to let it all fade into background clamor, one foot in front of the other.

“Hey, boss, is that a new ‘un?”

“Look here, boys, just when we thought we was gettin’ bored!”

“Speak for yourself; that one looks so skinny he’ll snap in half the first time anyone--”

“Shut it, you lot!” the cop shouts, banging a billy club against the nearest set of bars, and even in the subsequent quiet I feel two stuttered heartbeats for throwing up, every instinct I have screaming at me to turn around and run. My escort just huffs and tugs me along, shaking his head. “Disgusting. All right, it’s down here around the corner. Like I said, good luck gettin’ anything from him.”

The hallway around the corner is almost entirely empty cells, save for one, an emaciated, huddled form wrapped in a threadbare blanket leaning back against the bars, a tuft of blackish hair sticking up over the worn fabric. Oh God. Oh _God_.

“Oh God,” I whisper, checking to make sure the cop is gone before I kneel on the other side of the cell door, reaching in to rest my hand on his shoulder. “Oh God, Marco.”

It’s the first time I’ve said his name since July. It sits as easily on my tongue as it ever did.

He lunges away from the touch so quickly that he almost blurs out of my vision, sucking in a ragged breath and whipping around as he clambers back frantically across the dirty concrete. His cheeks are sunken and pale, the tan shade of his freckled skin that I remember gone in favor of a sickly pallor that stands in sharp contrast to the black eye and bruised jaw that color his face into a mottled canvas of blues and purples and yellow-greens. But it’s his eyes that hold the most damage, wide and dark with visceral terror that I’ve only seen in the faces of hunted animals.

He’s been trying to get me down here since August.

“What’s happened to you?” I breathe, and it doesn’t strike me until the words are already gone that I don’t really want to know.

A few seconds pass with nothing but the background noise of the cell block to fill the silence between us, his eyes the only two bright spots in the shadowed corner where he’s huddled. And then, slowly, cautiously, he leans forward, a glance darting back over his shoulder with every inch he moves.

“J-Jean?” His voice cracks, dry and unused, the disbelief in it jamming between my ribs like a white-hot blade. He shuffles forward another foot or so, swallowing heavily before he tries to talk again. “Jean?”

“Yeah, it’s me. I’m here.” I nod, trying to cough around the thickness in my throat, but before I have time to do anything Marco’s back at the cell door again, head bowed and shoulders heaving as he reaches out through the bars and presses shaking hands to the sides of my face, both his arms bruised all the way up to where they disappear beneath the blanket.

“Y-you came,” he practically sobs, pulling me forward until our foreheads touch, a watery smile stretching across his beat-up face. His teeth flash bloody in the dim overhead lights. “You actually c-came, oh God, I missed you so much, darlin’, you actually _came_ …”

“Shh, hey, it’s okay.” It’s reflex for my arms to wrap around him, but he stiffens when my hands settle against his shoulderblades, won’t relax until I’m not touching his back anymore. “It’s okay. You’re okay.”

A lie. He’s beaten half-dead and looks back over his shoulder every few seconds, moves like every part of him is hurting. But he’s here, he’s tangible beneath my fingers in a way that’s something other than the pages of unopened letters, and that missing piece I’ve been ignoring is finally back where it belongs.

I was a fool to think I could ever know contentment after him.

Marco shakes his head around a gurgling laugh, rough fingertips still tracing the lines of my cheekbones and jaw like he’s not sure I’m actually here. “I ain’t nowhere close to okay. But I’m better now.”

Frowning, I reach up and rest my hands over his, thumbs brushing the chapped surface of his knuckles. “This is awful. There’s no way that treating you like this is any sort of legal, there has to be someone you can tell--”

“Shhhhh!” His eyes go wide, terror flashing hazel in his irises as he claps a hand over my mouth and looks hurriedly side to side. “Don’t let anyone hear you sayin’ that shit. If you rat on someone in here you’re dead.”

I yank his hand away, checking again to make sure the coast is clear before turning back and hissing “I can’t just do nothin’, not when--”

“I gotta get outta here, Jean.” Everything in him is sheer desperation, fists clenching in the fabric of my shirt, breaths coming in quick gasps. “I won’t last sixteen years in here. I won’t even last one. I know I got no right to ask you for help, but--”

“What do you need me to do?” There hasn’t been an option of me walking away since I saw him huddled in the corner, wounded and scared. My shot at normalcy went out the window the day I met him, and leaving him to this fate now won’t help get it back. I don’t have any certainty in my life anymore. Everything is falling and I have nothing left to cling to, nothing except the fact that I refuse to leave him.

Marco lets out a breathy, relieved little laugh, rocking back on his heels. “There’s a gun. Under a loose floorboard on Connie and Sasha’s porch, there’s a revolver and a box of bullets. If you can get those to me, I can hide 'em until they come around to do bed check and get out.”

“That’s it?”

“What, askin’ you to sneak an unregistered gun into a prison for a convicted felon, aid his escape, and risk gettin’ put in here yourself?” he scoffs, scrubbing a hand down the side of his face that isn’t covered by the black eye. “Yeah, that’s about it.”

“Fine. I’ll be here tomorrow.” There’s no time to balk at the idea, no time to think about what I heard on the way back here and imagine living it. Fear is a paralytic. But what I feel right now, looking at him, touching him for the first time in months and letting him back under my skin where he belongs, that’s a catalyst.

“You can say no. You don’t have to do this.”

“What is it with you and tryin’ to talk me out of things after I’ve agreed to them?” I snap, raking a hand through my hair with a frustrated growl. “You don’t get to sit there lookin’ like that and tell me to just leave you. Go to hell, Marco.”

“Halfway there, darlin’.”

“God, you little…” Even with bloodstained teeth and swollen lips, his Cheshire Cat smile still looks the same. Cursing under my breath, I tug him forward and kiss him as gently as I’m able to, ignoring the veneer of sticky copper on my lips when I pull away. If anything, he just grins wider, settling back against the bars like he’d been when I walked up to the cell. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

I’m halfway back to the corner when Marco calls out, “Hey, Jean.”

“Yeah?”

“I…” He starts, but lapses into silence, waiting a beat before he finds his words again. “I’m glad you came. I’ll try not to get shanked between now and tomorrow.”

Grumbling, I stalk back to the cell, leaning down and glaring at him. “Don’t even joke about that. I gotta go. I love you.”

Marco whips around, blinking with eyes wide as dinner plates. “Yeah? When did that happen?”

“About five months ago. Don’t get cocky.”

“Too late for that, darlin’,” he laughs even as I make a flustered little noise and retreat around the corner, his voice cutting over the clamor of the cell block. “Way too late for that.”

* * *

The plan I come up with is simple enough, made simpler by the fact that I spend most of the night lying awake once I’m back in Dallas and thinking about it until a fitful sleep finally claims me.

When morning rolls around, I mummify myself in blankets and tell Mom I feel sick, ask her to tell Eren for me and lie in bed groaning feebly until the Wagners swing by to pick her and Nettie up for church. As soon as the sound of their car fades off at the end of the road, I’m up and moving, washing up and changing into fresh clothes, throwing the dirty ones on the bed before going through the rest of the house like I’m on the hunt for buried treasure. A few more of my oil-stained work shirts, some of Ninette’s more battle-scarred dresses, and soon enough I’ve got a good-sized pile shoved into the bag I’d originally packed back in August, the rumpled fabric shoved over folded clothes and closed up in a rush.

They’ll be at church for an hour, maybe lunch afterwards, and it’s a half-hour drive back home. Two and a half hours at my absolute luckiest.

Halfway to the truck, I stop, turn around. There’s no need for it, not really. I’m wasting time standing here thinking about it.

“Dammit,” I hiss, turning on my heel and running back to my room to grab my trumpet case from under the bed and hauling it out to throw in the truck with everything else. Safe is better than sorry, and somehow feels like poetic justice that I’m bringing my little box of secrets along with me as I craft the biggest one I’ll ever keep.

The Springers’ screen door swings open on my second knock, Sasha wiping her hands off on her apron as she looks up at me, confused. “Jean Kirschtein? Ain’t seen you in a month of Sundays.”

“Mornin’, Mrs. Springer,” I nod, trying for a winning smile. I’m not the best at buttering people up, a little too blunt for my own good, but for the sake of the plan I do my best to channel Marco, leaning in the doorway and feeling a crooked grin settle on my lips. “And might I add that you look radiant.”

“You’re sweet,” she laughs, brushing stray hairs back from her face and stepping out onto the porch. “Did you swing by just to smooth-talk me, or is there something you need?”

“Actually.” It takes a little tugging to get all the clothes out of the bag, presenting the pile to her like some sort of shoddily-wrapped Christmas gift. “Mom can’t quite get the stains outta these. My little sister goes through dresses like a hot knife through butter, but with funds the way they are…”

“Don’t I know it,” Sasha huffs, picking up the hem of one of the dresses to squint at the dirt rubbed into the fabric. “I think I can save these. If I go at ‘em the old fashioned way with a washboard and lye soap, it should come right out.”

“I remember when you used to starch my school uniforms for me,” I tell her, shifting back and forth and praying for her to just take the stuff inside already. “Every Thursday I’d drive down with Mom to pick ‘em up. They always looked so nice.”

“Yeah, well, my operation’s a little more understated ever since Mom and Dad lost the dry cleaner’s,” she smiles a little sadly, taking the pile of clothes out of my arms. “I’d normally say fifty cents for this, but I’ll write it off.”

“Are you sure? I got the money right here--”

“Don’t worry ‘bout it, sugar.” Waving me off, she ducks back through the door, carrying the load of clothes back through the living room. “I’ll have these done by dinnertime, just swing by when you can.”

As soon as she disappears around a corner, I drop to the floor, hands scrabbling. My earlier nervous shifting served a dual purpose, feet mapping out the floorboards until I found one that rattled and creaked when I put weight on it. It’s hard for me to wiggle my fingers into the narrow seam, whispering a stream of curses, but the board gives and flips up after a second, a cloud of dust rising in its wake. In the hollow space under the porch, there’s a worn-out old cookie tin sitting in the dirt, heavy and rattling when I pick it up. Heart hammering, I stomp the loose floorboard back into place and hightail it back to my truck, not able to breathe until I’m well past the end of the road.

The garage is closed the way it always is before noon on Sundays when I pull up, turning off my engine in front of the shop and letting my head fall back against the top of my seat with a long exhalation. I pulled off steps one and two. Now, the hard part starts.

The cookie tin is old and a little rusted, stubborn when I try to yank off the lid until it finally pops with a loud, metallic snap. Sitting inside is a cardboard box of bullets and a Colt revolver. The taste of bile settles thick along the backs of my teeth.

_Blood everywhere, seeping out under the door of the study and police sirens and Mom screaming until her voice gives out. Ninette cries and tugs my sleeve and says she doesn’t understand and neither do I, Nettie, I tell her, neither do I. He didn’t leave a note and he didn’t leave a goddamn cent for us to get by on, just left more blood on the carpet than I thought a human body could hold and a smoking Colt revolver._

Now is not the time. I swallow hard, shove the memories back and fight the urge to throw up as I shove the bullets in my pocket and reach gingerly into the cookie tin for the gun. I’ve never held a pistol in my life. The only time I’ve ever even been near a gun was wrapping shaking hands around a rifle when Dad tried to take me hunting with his business pals; I was maybe ten or eleven. I didn’t have the stomach for it, couldn’t stand all the blood and clapped my hands over my ears when the deer went down with a wounded scream. Dad clapped me on the back afterwards and told me that I was a man now.

The next time a hunting trip came around, I got conveniently ill.

The Colt feels heavier in my hand than it looks, the polished wood handle and brushed metal somehow managing to package up death and make it look elegant. I tuck it into my waistband before I get out of the car, and the cold steel against my skin steals every scrap of air from my lungs. One foot in front of the other. What happened two years ago is done. What happens today depends on me.

I unlock one of the garage doors and roll it up with a wince, hoping the rattle didn’t make it out to the street. It’s dark and musty inside, but I could find my way around the place blind, hands skating over parked cars and the workbench until my grip closes around the stiff edge of a tarp and yanks, exposing the long-forgotten Model T in a cloud of dust. Eren refused to sell a stolen car, and I couldn’t bring it home without answering too many questions, and so here it sat. There’s nothing in my mind but a constant plea that it hasn’t sat too long as I pull the keys out of the glove compartment and stick them in the ignition, turning and muttering “Please, please, please.”

My truck is temperamental about making the trip to Eastham to begin with and will do forty-five miles an hour at an all-out sprint. If things go wrong, I need a real car. Something you could smuggle hooch in, fast and reliable. Marco said something once about Al Capone’s empire being built on the floorboards of the Ford Model T. Here’s hoping it wasn’t complete bullshit.

The engine turns over with an absolute _purr_ , and I rest my head against the steering wheel with a wavering laugh, easing the car out of the garage before hopping out to transfer my stuff from the truck, lock the place up again, and take one long, last look around. No use prolonging the inevitable.

I hop back in the car and head up the road, putting the engine through its paces before I’m even out of town. I don’t leave a note, don’t leave an apology, just leave an empty garage and empty bed.

Maybe the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree after all.

The trip to Eastham goes faster with the better car and the knowledge of where I’m going, but it seems too easy, nervousness sparking electric in my bones and setting my teeth on edge. By the time I park the car in front of the reception door, I’m nothing but tremors, swallowing gasps of terror when I walk inside. It’s not the same cop from yesterday working the desk. This one’s younger, skinnier, and looks to be in much more of a foul mood when I check in, hollering something down the hall about getting one of the visitation rooms ready before he scratches something out on a clipboard.

“Wait, what?” I choke.

“Standard procedure, kid.”

Shit.

“But I was just here yesterday and I--”

“Yeah, well, Wald’s two months from retirement and don’t give a shit about policy. I like my job, so you’ll be gettin’ patted down and escorted to a visitation room.”

_Shit._

I didn’t plan for this. My knees start to buckle, and my head rushes into white noise, the sound of my heartbeat loud in my ears.

Somehow, I’ve ended up pointing a gun at him. How strange.

“I think I’ll be headed back to the cell block, actually.” There’s a level, placid sort of calm that settles over me, a clarity that lets me trace the progression of fear across the cop’s face as he realizes what’s going on. Fuck, I hope I’m holding this thing right. “Go on. And don’t try anything stupid.”

Because, you know. I’m not trying anything stupid. I know exactly what I’m doing.

The cell block goes deadly quiet when they all see me marching the guard back through the dim hallway, a few shocked murmurs the only distraction from the hum of the overhead lights and the rhythm of our footfalls. Every breath seems sharp and focused, like breathing in ice, the world in sharp relief. I am hyper-aware. Is this what being alive actually is?

Is this what he feels all the time?

Marco’s curled up in the corner of his cell again, doesn’t stir until I clear my throat. He turns around, smiling when he sees me until the rest of the image sinks home and he lets out a dismayed groan. “You were s’posed to _sneak the gun in_ , genius.”

“Yeah, well.” Shrugging, I prod the guard in the back with the business end of the Colt, every cell in my brain still firing on overdrive. “Go on, let him out.”

“Jean, what the hell is this?” Marco asks, looking absolutely dumbfounded as the guard leans down to unlock the door.

“You said that you wanted to help me get out.” My hands have stopped shaking. For the first time in recent memory, I’m not scared. “This is me. Gettin’ out.”

“And they said I was crazy,” he snorts, yanking the guard into his cell as soon as the door’s open and knocking his head hard against the bars. The guy goes down, still breathing, and Marco grabs the keys from his hands before stepping out and shutting the door behind him. “But you, Jean Kirschtein, are either the bravest or the most insane sonuvabitch I’ve met in my natural life.”

“And you really wanna kiss me right now,” I smirk.

“And I really wanna kiss you right now.”

He pulls me in, hands splayed across the small of my back, kisses me so hard that my shiny-sharp world goes fuzzy for a few moments. Any possibility of a life outside of this is gone now, and not just because I’ve busted a felon out of prison with a stolen gun. I could never go back to Dallas after this. The person I’m supposed to be died when I picked up the pistol in the garage parking lot, was buried when I pulled it on a man of the law. I can’t go back there as the person I am.

The fact that I don’t have a choice feels much better than it should. I hook the thumb of my free hand behind the hinge of Marco’s jaw and kiss him back until the old me is down so deep that I’ll never see him again.

He pulls back sharply, our lips disconnecting with a wet pop, and frowns down at the gun in my other hand. “Hold up, do you have the safety on that thing turned on?”

“Uh…” I don’t even know where the safety is.

“Wait, Jean, did you even _load_ it?”

Shit.

“Oh for the love of…” Marco rolls his eyes, grabbing the gun out of my hand. “Give me that.”

I laugh a little nervously, reaching into my pocket and holding out a handful of ammunition. “Bullets?”

“I cannot _believe_ \--”

“D’you really wanna stand here and argue about this, or would you prefer to leave?!”

"Yeah. Leave. I'd rather leave," he says, shaking his head slightly and taking off down the hall in the opposite direction of the cell block door.

"Uh, Marco?" He's too busy loading the gun and mumbling to himself to pay me any mind, eyes sharp and focused straight ahead. He looks like himself again. Too bad 'himself' is a reckless idiot who probably won't make the best decisions given this situation.

"Bustin' into a state prison with an _unloaded gun_ , holding the place up with the fuckin' safety on, I done seen everything now..."

"Marco!" I get an exasperated look in response, but at least he stops, turning around and spreading his arms in a questioning gesture. "Ain't the front door that way?"

"Yeah, 'course, just let me waltz out the front door in a prison uniform; I'm sure the boys in the guard towers'll let us go with no issue." Oh. Five months of hell, and he's still a better strategist than I am. "We gotta go this way. Evidence locker."

He's obviously been studying the layout of the place, whipping around corners and ducking through side doors almost faster than I can follow, silent as a shadow. I don't miss the way his finger rests over the trigger guard of the revolver, try to think of something else as we move further I can to the bowels of the prison. My plan didn't include anyone dying today, but it also didn't include me getting dragged into a full scale prison break as anything more than an accessory.

Marco stops outside a seemingly innocuous door, gives me a long look before he kicks in and strides over the threshold like he owns the place. Cursing, I dive after him just in time to see him pointing the gun straight in the face of a rightfully terrified guard, a sly smirk curling at his bruised lips. “Afternoon, officer. Marco Bodt, arrived in July, checkin’ out early. I’d like my effects, if you don’t mind.”

The guy practically trips over himself to yank a brown paper bag out of a wall lined with wooden cubbies, handing it over with trembling hands.

“Thank you,” Marco smiles sweetly just before he tosses the gun up, grabs it out of the air by the barrel, and cracks the grip across the guard’s jaw so hard that the snap of wood on bone bounces off the walls.

My jaw drops just about as fast as the guard does, eyes wide and mouth slack around a whispered “Jesus Christ.”

Marco just shrugs, digging a shirt, pants and suspenders out of the bag. “He ain’t dead. He’ll just have a hell of a headache when he wakes up. Go over there and make sure no one’s coming down the hall.”

I stammer out some unintelligible response, still shell-shocked, the last thing I see before I go to stick my head out the door the pained expression on Marco’s face, wincing as he yanks his shirt off over his head to reveal more dark bruises across his ribs, a long trail down his side where you can almost see the imprints of the boots that put them there. Since August. He tried since August to reach me, and I tucked the letters away and lived my life and left him to this.

Fear’s a paralytic, love’s a catalyst, and guilt is corrosive. I can practically feel myself being eaten away.

“Well would you look at that,” he says from behind me, and I turn around to watch him placing that worn-out old newsboy cap on his head almost reverently, tilting it off-center with a little laugh that sends a shiver down my spine. “Silver lining.”

“You can go all dizzy over your new threads once we get you outta jail,” I tell him, trying to direct my attention to anything but the way the corners of his mouth turn up, feral and almost _hungry_ as he moves across the room with a mountain lion’s predatory grace, drawing up behind me and smiling against the side of my neck.

“Don’t be so tense,” he chuckles, one hand skating down my arm while the one loosely gripping the Colt settles on my hip. “We’re gonna walk outta here. We’ll be gone for hours before anyone knows. They’ll be talkin’ about this one for years.”

“So let’s do it already.” Before the blood flow moving rapidly away from my brain makes me pass out, preferably.

“Fine, fine,” Marco sighs, pressing a kiss to the angle of my jaw and twirling the stolen keys around his finger. “You’re no fun. C’mon, there’s a service door down this hallway.”

The sun is bright and blinding when we emerge into the dusty prison yard. I have trouble orienting myself, but even after months inside Marco seems to know exactly where he’s going, sticking to the shadows of the doorframe until the guard in the nearest tower turns around, dragging me around a corner and back to the front side of the building.

“Don’t look so stiff,” he hisses, eyes doing a slow back-and-forth sweep of the yard as we move. No one walking around outside, and the person who’s supposed to be in reception is locked up in Marco’s cell right now. We’re lucky. We’re so goddamn lucky considering the circumstances, and that only makes me more nervous. “Anyone stops us, we’re on our way back from dropping off our brother. Stupid kid got picked up for breaking and entering again. A real kleptomaniac. Ma tried with him, God rest her soul.”

“How d’you make up lies so fast?”

“Lots of practice and a pinch of natural talent. Where’s your truck parked?”

“I brought the Model T, actually,” I mumble, tugging him towards the car and reaching for the keys with shaking fingers.

“Who’d have thought a mechanic from West Dallas’d have the balls to roll down here on stolen wheels and bust me out with my old .45,” he laughs, climbing into the passenger seat and watching me with that same almost-hungry look as I start the engine. “You’re a regular epitome of moral decay, Jean Kirschtein.”

“How eloquent. Been readin’ Oscar Wilde in your cell again?”

“Norse mythology, actually. Fascinating stuff. Drive slow. They won’t stop you if you don’t look like you’re in a rush.”

The next few minutes pass in tense silence, nothing but the sound of the engine and Marco telling me which way to turn once we’re out the main gate, guiding me through a narrow maze of backroads until we’re sitting at the edge of one that’s actually paved.

“Which way?” I ask, drumming my fingers anxiously on the wheel.

“I love you too, y’know,” he says.

I blink once, twice. “That’s nice. Are we going north or south?”

“Jean.” Before I can turn around and beg him to save it for later, he’s pulling me in by the shirt collar and pressing his lips to mine, a small smile against my mouth and a touch that’s almost tender, callused fingertips tracing nonsensical patterns across the nape of my neck. “You had every reason to let me rot in that place, and you got me out. You walked into a state prison and walked out with a fugitive in tow, and I swear to _God_ if you’re still scared of me sayin’ I love you after that, you really gotta re-examine your priorities.”

“I ain’t scared of that,” I say, so soft it’s more of a breath than a whisper.

“Then what are you scared of?”

“I’m scared ‘cause I don’t know where we go from here,” I croak, hands shaking even after I grip the steering wheel hard in an effort to still them. “I’m scared because I just broke about ten different laws and I’m about to break a hundred more and I’m scared because I _want to_ and because I want this and you and I’m fuckin’ scared because I don’t know whether to turn right or left, okay, Marco, so just tell me!”

His hand slips down to the nape of my neck, thumb brushing the rise of my spine where it slopes down between my shoulders. “Go right.”

I do. And we drive. And it’s quiet.

“All right. So what do we do next?” I ask after a couple more miles, still driving slow even though we’re well out of sight of the prison.

Marco gives me his best Cheshire Cat smile, reaching down and resting his hand over mine where it’s sitting on the gearshift. The touch alone makes me feel like I’ve gotten an answer.

“We raise hell. Floor it, darlin’. I wanna see what this old pile of tin can do.”

 


	13. Marco

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I hope you guys enjoy the flashback. I look forward to watching y'all duke out who has dibs on the Brothers Bodt in the comments. Also, just for visual reference, have this beautiful drawing of [the Bodtlings](http://gyazo.com/6da677a5064c3447ac8a0713e33b24ac) that the incredible [Deb](http://lemonorangelime.tumblr.com) did for me. Consider this update a birthday present for her and the ever-amazing [Kenji.](http://kenjiandcompany.tumblr.com)
> 
> Have fun, kids.

_“But why can’t I go?!”_

_The sun outside the barn is nothing short of blistering, the worn fabric of a thrice-handed-down shirt sticking between my shoulders and the patches of exposed skin starting to burn but I don’t care, buoyed by some sort of righteous rage that makes me bigger than what my hatefully little body can contain._

_“Because you’re a kid, Marco,” Miles sighs, saddling up his horse and barely even looking at me. That’s what happens when you’re the youngest of six brothers. You’re the annoyance. The inconvenience. The one under everyone’s feet. They push you to the sidelines and try to forget you._

_Not today._

_“I ain’t a kid! I’m eleven; that’s old enough! Michael’s going and he’s only a year older than me!” I protest, kicking angrily at the dusty floorboards and scowling at my oldest brother. Miles probably doesn’t even remember what it’s like to be eleven and so much smaller than your dreams, eighteen and six-foot-something with an accepted application to start training for the Texas Rangers next year. I might as well be talking to a brick wall._

_“I get to go ‘cause I blackmailed Miles and threatened to tell Pa I saw him sneakin’ off with Emily the other day if he didn’t talk him into letting me go,” Michael calls from a few yards away, sharp features curled into a smirk as he crosses the barn tossing an apple back and forth between his hands._

_Miles rolls his eyes, reaching over the stall door to smack Michael upside the back of the head as he swaggers out of the barn with a laugh. Grumbling, he lifts a hand to brush back dark curls I’m surprised Ma hasn’t chewed him out for not cutting yet and says, “Michael’s going ‘cause we need an extra set of hands, and it’ll be hard enough keepin’ an eye on him without throwing you into the mix.”_

_“I won’t be a pain, honest! I can help!”_

_He just shakes his head, still not even bothering to look at me. Behind us, the barn door rattles open, a wave of heat rolling in from outside in the wake of Maddox and Matthew walking in with coils of rope slung over their shoulders, identical faces sprayed with identical freckles and mouths curved into perpetual, identical smirks. Matt stops, blinks, tilts his head. “What’s all the ruckus?”_

_“Marco wants to go on the cattle drive,” Miles sighs, the same tone of voice Ma uses when she talks about foxes getting into the henhouse again._

_“So?” Maddox shrugs. “Let him.”_

_“Yeah, let me!”_

_“Cattle drives are_ dangerous _, Marco.” Like I didn’t know that, like I haven’t been paying attention to it my whole life. With an exasperated sigh, Miles finally deigns to look at me, leaning on one of the stall’s support posts and grimacing around the cigarette perched in one corner of his mouth. “I went on one when I wasn’t too much older than you, wandered off and got lost for four nights and five days. Almost died.”_

_Which, of course, only serves to make me more excited, clambering up to sit on top of the stall door and gaping up at him with wide eyes. “Woah, really? What happened?”_

_“I don’t remember.”_

_“Aw, bullshi--”_

_“Watch your mouth,” says Miles, flicking the side of my head and trying to fight back a smile. “But really, I was starving and dehydrated by the time Pa found me. A lot of it’s blurry. And the stuff I can remember, well… I don’t really wanna remember it.”_

_“Hey, Marco, wanna know a secret?” Matt snickers, coming back out of the tack room and walking over to ruffle my hair. “If you wanna get him to talk about it, you gotta get him drunk first.”_

_“Yeah, then he won’t shut up about his big heroic adventure,” Maddox chimes in, leading his horse behind him with a grin. “Because nothin’ enchants the ladies like talkin’ about drinking your own piss--”_

_Miles shuts the twins up with a glare that could melt steel, and right there, right now, it’s easy to see why he’s going to be a lawman. It’s not just being the oldest that makes people want to listen to him. It’s something in the way that he carries himself, something unspoken that I can only sit there with my useless eleven years of life experience and envy. People see him. They notice him. I’ve always wanted that, but there’s something about the idea of putting on a badge and answering to a chain of command to get it that’s never sat well with me. But hell, I can’t even talk my way into a cattle drive. At this rate, I don’t have much of a future to worry about._

_“Why don’t you two go help Martin with the tents and actually do something useful ‘stead of bumpin’ your gums?” The twins disappear almost disturbingly fast. Grumbling under his breath, Miles lifts me up off the stall door and sets me down so he can lead his horse out, squatting down once he does so that our eyes are level. “I’ll talk to Pa and see if you can go on the next one. But it ain’t gonna happen this time.”_

_“Why d’you not wanna remember what happened?” Easily distracted, I keep pressing the issue even after the others are gone, smoothing the hair that Matt rumpled up back into place._

_“‘Cause it ain’t pretty,” Miles sighs, standing back up and ruffling my hair all over again. “Sometimes when bad things happen, it’s best not to think about ‘em. You take stuff outta your nightmares and dwell on it, and it’ll drive you crazy.”_

_“So you just block it out?”_

_“You keep livin’, Marco,” he says, climbing up into the saddle and squinting out the barn door. “That’s the only choice you really got. Keep livin’ or don’t. That’s why you shouldn’t go on one of these drives ‘til you’re older. You’re too young to have to make that kinda choice. If I had my way, you’d never have to make it at all.”_

_“I just wanna get off this damn farm,” I grumble, crossing my arms over my chest._

_“You will someday, kid. And I ain’t gonna tell you to watch that mouth again.”_

_“What’s the holdup in here?” A long shadow falls across the door in time with a sliver of ice jabbing downwards through my spine despite the oppressive heat._

_“Nothin’, Pa. I was letting Marco help me clean up before we left,” Miles covers flawlessly, not even a blink to give away the lie, and I wonder for a moment if his talents are really best served upholding justice._

_But my father sees through bullshit with an eagle eye, stares the both of us down from the saddle of his Pinto before his scrutiny finally settles on me. I feel it crawling around under my skin, like he sees everything, the desperate desire to get out and the sin of my ungratefulness and the sin of something much worse that I keep locked up tight behind clenched teeth while I pray to stop looking forward to going into town on Sundays because the grocer’s son who’s about my age has the prettiest blue eyes I’ve ever seen and my whole body feels hot every time I see him and--_

_“Ain’t you s’posed to be in the house?”_

_My guts sink like lead. “Yes, Pa.”_

_“Then why’re you out here?”_

_“I… I wanted…”_

_“I told you to stay outta your brothers’ way and go help your mother with Maura.” I know that tone of voice, my whole body tensing up in anticipatory terror of him getting down off his horse, and God, do I wish I could run. “How am I s’posed to expect you to be the man of the house while we’re gone if you can’t even mind, Marco, I swear to--”_

_“It’s my fault.” I have to fight tooth and nail to keep from gaping disbelievingly up at Miles, who keeps a perfect poker face as he clicks his tongue and trots his horse out into the yard, swiping an arm across his forehead. “I stuck my head in the back door and asked him to come sweep out the tack room ‘cause Martin didn’t have time to do it this morning. I didn’t know you’d told him to stay inside.”_

_It’s a blatant lie - I snuck out through the kitchen when Ma went upstairs to get Maura from her nap - but it’s enough to defuse the situation. Pa nods at Miles stiffly before looking back at me, the danger in his gaze fading out to mere disapproval. “We’ll be back in a week. Take care of your sister, mind your Ma, and stay outta trouble, you hear me?”_

_“Yes, Pa.” Like I have a choice._

_I climb out onto the roof of the house through the attic to watch them all ride off, peeking over the rusty gutters as my father and my brothers disappear into vague blurs on the horizon. The closest to any excitement I’m ever likely to get. I scowl and grip the loose shingles, debating on jumping off just to feel the rush that would come before the broken bones._

_“Marco!” Ma yells from downstairs. Maura’s crying again._

_“Be there in a minute!”_

_The sun’s finally starting to go down, but the long shadows across the house and the yard just look like bars on a cell. I feel claustrophobic and, for some reason, needlessly terrified. It’s hard to breathe, my lungs fighting the weight of the horror that feels out of place in the here and now._

_Is it the here and now? The edges of the world are soft, and I can’t, I can’t…_

_“Marco,” Ma’s voice is warped, brassy, deeper. “Marco? Marco!”_

“Marco!” Jean elbows me in the ribs, and I damn near jump out of my seat, whipping around with a strangled little yelp and a choked, paralyzed gasp before the panic settles and I take in my surroundings. Not the farm, and not a jail cell. A car, jolting down a dirt road in the dusty afternoon, Jean behind the wheel, his face worried and drawn. “Are you okay?”

My whole body aches. I don’t know why I’m shaking. There’s a constant fear curled in the back of my skull, I feel like squirming out of my skin with something other than a solid wall at my back, and I’ve got six months of hell straight out of the pages of someone’s most fucked-up nightmares pressing at the lining of my chest. Am I okay?

_Sometimes when bad things happen, it’s best not to think about ‘em. You take stuff outta your nightmares and dwell on it, and it’ll drive you crazy._

So I stop thinking about it, smile at him and reach down to squeeze his hand. “Never better, darlin’.”

“It’s just that you been staring out the window for an hour, and…”

“I’m just tired.” Leave it at that. Please, for the love of my sanity, leave it at that.

He looks at me for a long moment, something in his eyes that says he doesn’t quite believe me, but he doesn’t press it. Instead, he exhales heavily and looks back out the windshield, drumming long fingers on the steering wheel. “You never said where we’re headed. I’ve been driving north, right?”

“Huh?” I blink, still trying to tether myself to reality. Here with him is better than Eastham or Telico or any other living hell that’s haunting my head, but I can’t stop myself from feeling dissociated, set adrift and held only by the place where his fingers twine up with mine. “Oh, yeah. We’re going to Dallas.”

Jean pulls off on the side of the road with a cloud of dust and screeching brakes, turning back to me with wide eyes and the color draining from his face. “The hell we are.”

“We gotta go back, or else--”

“I can’t go back to Dallas!” he cuts me off, hands flying up to his hair and panic ratcheting his voice up half an octave. “I packed up all my shit and _left_ , Marco, and they know I’m gone by now. I can’t just go back.”

“Believe me, the last place I wanna go right now is Dallas!” I snap back, pinching the bridge of my nose and trying to stomp my fractured psyche into submission so I can fucking _think_ already. “But there’s something in your house that I gotta get before we hit the road. I’ve been workin’ on a plan for five months, Jean. I need you to trust me.”

“I do. You know I do.” The look he gives me is almost wounded, a hand brushing the side of my face but twitching away when I wince in pain as it skates over the bruises there. “I just… what could you have possibly left in my house that’s important enough to run that risk?”

“The money I stole from the pawnshop back in July.”

If possible, Jean goes even paler. “Jesus Christ.”

“We need that money, or we’re fucked. I wouldn’t ask you to go back if we didn’t have to,” I tell him, reaching over with a still-shaking hand to smooth his hair down. I hope he doesn’t notice the tremors, but the way he holds me a moment too long when I lean over to press my lips to his forehead says that he does. “Now drive. Please. The more distance I put between me and that place the better.”

Jean eventually nods and pulls the Model T back out onto the road, his lips pressed into a thin line as he squints against the sunlight. “How much money’d you leave at the house?”

I shrug, trying to remember the number of stacks I’d shoved in the paper bag before hiding it in the linen closet and hoping Mrs. Kirschtein or Jean would find it after I was gone, a parting atonement. “Probably ‘bout three-fifty, four hundred dollars.”

Jean makes this weird wheezing-choking sound, one hand lifting off the wheel to scrub down the side of his face.

“I was gonna leave it for you and your folks, but due to circumstances, my contribution’s gonna have to wait.” I try to roll my shoulders, hoping to shrug off some of the discomfort that comes with having open space to my back, but the motion hurts so much that all I get for it is a low moan of pain and a panicked flash of the memory of what put the bruises there in the first place. I can’t afford to think like that. The choice I have is to keep living or don’t.

I decide to keep living, shove the screams to the back of my throat.

“So, what happens after we get the money?” he asks, and it’s enough to draw me out of my own head, to bring my focus to the task at hand. As much as I talk about the value of never being weighed down, I’m indescribably glad to have Jean as an anchor right now.

“It’s kinda complicated,” I sigh, trying to rub some of the dried blood off my lips and only serving to reopen the split in them with a pained wince, the taste of copper coating my teeth. Rest. Rest needs to be on the agenda somewhere. Hadn’t factored that in yet. “But if you’re askin’ what our next stop is, we’re headed to Houston.”

“Thought you said we were gonna go North.”

“We will, after we go to Houston.”

“But why--”

“Because I’ve actually been _thinking_ about this, Jean!” He practically recoils from the bullwhip-snap that covers the words, and a bloom of regret softens me for a moment before I remember that my damned softness is what landed me in this mess in the first place, grit my teeth and ball my hands up in my lap. I can’t afford any more lapses, any more stupid mistakes. My last one resulted in _this_ , in months of praying to die in my sleep and nightmares that didn’t end when I woke up and scars that go a hell of a lot further than skin deep. No more.

“And you think I haven’t?” He murmurs, the horizon and the late afternoon sun mirrored amber in his irises. Damn it all.

He is so beautiful, and I am so weak.

“Well, given that you just busted me out of prison with an unloaded gun, I’m inclined to say ‘no,’ but…” Jean glares at me, and I can’t help but laugh, the sound feeling odd and unused in my throat. “Just giving you a hard time, darlin’. But we really do need that money.”

“I thought about this.” He’s not laughing it off, not letting me change the subject, his focus glued to the road and his grip going white-knuckled on the wheel. “I thought about you. Every day. And I tried not to, but here we are, so the least you can do is tell me what the hell you plan to do in Houston. We’re in this shitstorm together now, Marco, and we have been since I pulled out that gun, so stop treatin’ me like an accessory and start treatin’ me like an accomplice, because God knows the law will if they catch us.”

Silence falls for a moment, and I can’t come up with a retort, because he’s right. Being forthcoming has never been my strong suit, but for his sake, I’ll try. Groaning, I rub a hand along the uninjured side of my jaw and let my eyes drift shut. “You got a fuckin’ cigarette? This one’s a doozy.”

“Yeah, yeah, here,” Jean nods, passing me a smoke and a book of matches, fingertips brushing the tendons across the back of my hand as he pulls away. God, six months and he goes from terror to tenderness where I’m concerned. It was almost worth it.

“All right, so if we’re gonna do this, if we’re gonna go on the road, we gotta be adequately prepared,” I start, sparking the match to life on my thumbnail and lighting the cigarette with a grateful drag. “‘Cause right now, we got one revolver and a box of bullets to our names, and that ain’t gonna cut it. We need guns, we need ammo. I got a contact in Houston that can get us both. Problem is, I owe that contact a substantial amount of money.”

Jean frowns and asks, “How much money?”

“I reckon about two hundred and fifty. Plus interest.”

“God Almighty.” Letting out a low whistle, he shakes his head and gives me a sidelong glance. “How’d you end up that far in the red?”

“I, uh.” A nervous laugh sounds like a death rattle in my chest. “I may have been doing a job with Connie on a contract for this person and decided that it would be more prudent to run off with their share of the cash. And subsequently gotten arrested.”

Jean’s face is set in a perfect deadpan as he makes the turn for Dallas, voice flat when he speaks. “So your plan is to take stolen cash from my house, drive to Houston, make a house call to someone you _ripped off for two hundred and fifty dollars_ and ask ‘em if they’ve got any spare artillery laying around.”

“Two hundred and fifty plus interest,” I mutter, scratching at the back of my neck.

“Great plan.”

“You got any better ideas?!”

“Yeah, my vote goes to something that ain’t gonna get us killed!” Sucking in a breath through his teeth, he lets his head fall back against the seat, tendons in his arms flexing from gripping the wheel too hard. “Y’know what, no. I trust you. It’s probably gonna get me a load of grapeshot in my ass, but I trust you. We’ll grab the money and get the hell out, and pray that my folks ain’t home.”

He trusts me. I’m in no mental state to try and figure out why that knowledge makes everything a little more bearable. Jean’s trust doesn’t erase any of this, can’t take away the sleepless nights or heal the bruises, but it makes me rest a little easier in my seat as we continue up the road. For now, I don’t have to be scared of leaving my back unguarded. He’s got it.

Somewhere between the fork in the road and the outskirts of Dallas, he reaches down and grabs my hand. I finally stop shaking.

My choice is to keep living or don’t. I’ve chosen life. I’ve chosen him. And if my demons and my memories have something to say about it, they’ll wait until I’m more vulnerable than this to rear their heads. They always do.

Jean gets antsier the closer we get to Dallas, insists that we pull off the road and wait until after dark to drive to his house, something about his mother having bridge night on Sundays and the possibility of us sneaking in and out without anyone being home. Three hours parked in the stifling heat behind an abandoned gas station, dust blowing back and forth across the windshield of the Model T. Jean sleeps. I know better than to let myself slip into unconsciousness. The last thing he needs right now is to hear me wake up screaming.

Three hours, Jean sleeps, and I spend that time doing anything to stay out of the inside of my mind. I squint at my dim reflection in the window and try to clean up the dirt and dried blood plastered to my skin, do the best I can to wipe Eastham off of me with one of Jean’s handkerchiefs and pure determination. I stare out the front of the car and pay close attention to the way the wind picks up the dust and swirls it around until it gets too dark to see. I curl up in the corner between my chair and the car door and just watch the steady rise and fall of Jean’s chest for a while, the graceful arc of his spine as he curls inward and mumbles something in his sleep, the flutter of his eyelashes against his cheekbones. Those few precious nights before everything went to hell, the handful of times we sprawled out across his mattress in the dark laughing about stupid shit and kissing the smiles off each other’s lips, he always left after I fell asleep, went back to the living room to sleep on the couch. Better that way, he said. No one would ask questions.

I think now that if I’d ever had the chance to see him like this in Dallas, I might have been persuaded to stay. For someone who claims to be as restless as I am, Jean has something about him that makes you feel settled, even against your will.

It’s a stupid idea, but I still lean forward and ghost the pads of my fingers across the line of his cheekbone, the curve of his neck, trying to relearn him. He mutters something again and turns his head into the touch, flattening my palm against his cheek, and the little frown that’s been furrowing his brow and pulling at his lips softens. My chest feels tight.

This was never supposed to happen. I went my entire life believing that it just wasn’t something I was built for, and I was beyond fine with that. Being what I was, that was already complicated enough without throwing emotional attachment into the mix. I never wanted this before, never wanted the idea of my touch calming someone’s nightmares, never considered making plans that revolved around waking up to the same face for more than a few nights in a row. I never wanted Jean to hit my veins like a full flask of whiskey in ten minutes flat, to send me reeling and grasping for anything to keep me from falling. I didn’t want his crooked smile doing weird things to my heartbeat and I didn’t want kissing him to feel like coming home and I sure as hell didn’t want him to have to bust me out of jail because of whatever he feels on his end of the equation.

I didn’t want to love him, but I do. That’s the one thing in all of this that’s guaranteed to not change. The law can haul me back in tomorrow, and I will love him. My plans can crumble to dust and float away on the wind, and I will love him. Everything can catch fire and collapse around us and the whole world can go to hell in a fast car, and I will love him. I will love him. I will love him.

Jean wakes up with a sharp jerk and wide eyes that calm once he sees me still sitting there. With a sleepy smile he looks over at me and asks, “You get any rest?”

“Yeah,” I lie, looking out to the empty horizon as he starts the car again and pulls back onto the road. “Best sleep I’ve gotten in months.”

I will swallow the screams and refuse to acknowledge the nightmares and I will _keep living_ , and I will love him.

Jean drives up his street with the headlights off, winces when he shuts the car door like the quiet click is a gunshot in the dark. There’s no light coming from the house, but that doesn’t seem to help the nervous tension tugging at his shoulders as we walk up onto the porch, his fingers trembling visibly even in the shadows as he reaches for the door.

“You sure you wanna come in?” he whispers. “You can wait in the car if you want.”

I shake my head, reaching down to wrap my hand around his, turning the doorknob together. “If there’s gonna be a confrontation, I got things to answer for just as much as you do. C’mon. We need to be quick.”

Inside, it’s dark and quiet. Everything is the same as it was the last time I was here, the radio hunkered down in the corner of the living room, the faucet in the kitchen dripping steadily. Our footsteps creak on the aging floorboards, and Jean winces, turning back to me and mouthing, “All right, where’d you leave it?”

“Linen closet, top shelf.” He nods and shuffles carefully back towards the hallway, easing open the closet door and grimacing when the hinges creak. I feel useless standing there, shift my weight back and forth for a moment before I wave Jean down from the other end of the hall. “I’m gonna go grab stuff to eat from the kitchen. We can take some food on the road so we don’t have to--”

“No.”

“Jean--”

 _“No,”_ he snaps, the low volume deceptively masking the stern tone as he whips around to glare at me, eyes hard. “I can do all the shit I did today, I can come back to Dallas and go do God-knows-what in Houston with you and hit the road on the run from the law, but we are _not_ stealin’ so much as a goddamn saltine cracker from my family, you hear me?”

My strong-willed, stupidly noble boy. I try not to look too fond, know it’ll probably just make him angry. “Well, I don’t know if you’ve seen me lately, but I can’t exactly walk into a diner and not raise any eyebrows.”

“I don’t _care_ , you’re not--”

“Jean?” A thin, wavering soprano, scared and uncertain. A child’s voice.

 _“Shit,”_ I hiss, ducking into the kitchen and flattening myself against the wall. Jean would have blocked her view from the end of the hallway, and I was standing in the shadows to begin with.

“Jesus, Nettie.” Jean lets out a wavering breath, and from where I’m standing I can see his face as he whips around, the paper bag in one hand while the other presses to his chest. “You scared me half to death. Where’s… wait, are you here by yourself?”

“I’m s’posed to be at the Wagners’, but I came home.”

“You walked home alone in the dark? What have I told you about--”

“What’d you do, Jean?” Ninette says, her voice still not sounding like itself as she cuts him off, soft and on the edge of fear.

Jean sucks in a breath. “C’mon, let’s get you back to the Wagners’.”

“No!” And there’s her fire again, the sudden shout splitting the still air. All I can see from the kitchen is her shadow, and it takes a step back, shaking its head. “No one’ll tell me what’s going on, and I ain’t going nowhere ‘til you tell me!”

“Nettie, I don’t even know what all’s happening right now, okay? But you shouldn’t be here on your own.” He squats down in front of her, a hand coming up to brush her hair back from her face.

“Ma came home from bridge night and we were having dinner and Eren came runnin’ in here like a house on fire, said he needed to talk to her and shoved me out on the porch. They talked for a bit and then Ma came out all pale and stuff and told me to run on up to the Wagners’. I couldn’t hear nothing they said, but Eren was crying his eyes out, Jean; I ain’t never seen Eren cry before.”

“Oh, God.” Jean sounds absolutely mortified, and I have to bite back a growl of rage, because of _course_ Eren would come running straight to his family, of-fucking- _course_ he would.

“You did something, didn’t you?” Nettie whispers, the betrayal in the words so profound that it even hurts me, and I’m not the person it’s aimed at. “Something bad.”

Jean sighs again, standing back up, and says, “You might as well come on out.”

We could have gone without the money. We could have done a job somewhere between Eastham and Houston and avoided this entirely, and I would have taken the risk over this, over carving a smile into my face and forcing myself to step around the corner in all my battered lack of glory. “Evenin’, Miss Ninette.”

She’s grown in the last five months, as children tend to do, taller and even ganglier, all coltish limbs and scraped elbows and amber eyes widening from across the hallway. It’s hard to see the details in the dark, but I notice every ounce of disbelief etched into her face as she walks past Jean and over to me, trace the progression of shock to anger.

And I see every motion of her hand balling up into a fist, thumb on the outside, before it cracks right across my already bruised jaw.

Pain and the taste of blood explode in my mouth, the impact whipping me to the side so hard that I have to hunch over to keep from falling right on my ass, looking over at Ninette’s livid expression and swiping the back of my hand across my mouth. The skin comes back stained sticky red. “Been workin’ on that right hook, little darlin’?”

Her lower lip wobbles for a moment, eyes swimming before she lunges forward again. I half expect a punch to the gut, but instead she throws her arms around my waist and clings, shaking and biting back sobs. “I oughta beat the tar outta you.”

“Probably, yeah, but I think someone’s done the job for you already.” Levity. Light. If I can joke about it, I can push it back, can ignore the uneasy tingle crawling up my spine.

“Ma said you tried to steal all the money from that grocery store,” Ninette replies flatly, stepping back and looking up at me.

“I’ve stolen lots of things,” I admit. No use lying to her now.

“Yeah.” She’s got the same look Jean does, the one that makes you feel like she’s looking right through you, seeing your ulterior motives even before you do. “And now you’re gonna steal Jean, ain’t you?”

“Nettie…” Jean starts.

“He is!” Furiously, she whips around and smacks a hand against his chest, shaking where she stands and pawing the tear streaks from her cheeks. “You two are gonna run off. That’s why Eren was so upset and Ma looked so scared. He’s stealing you.”

And that was the plan all along, wasn’t it? Stealing him? From the day I decided that Jean wasn’t something I could leave behind, I had every intention of taking him from the people he loved with no regrets. I never considered the consequences because I’ve never given a damn about the people I stole from, but that’s just another weakness that snuck up to cripple me long before I ever noticed it. I caved for Jean, and I caved for his family. I caved for the sweetness his mother showed me that I couldn’t remember from my own. I caved for the bits of Maura that I saw in Ninette, for the parts of her that were entirely her own. In one month of stillness, I painted three massive targets on my own back, and right now it feels like there’s a bullet sinking home in each of them.

See, this is what happens when you let people in. The human body has trouble carrying one broken soul around. When you try to take on more, you start to crumble.

“Ninette, listen.” Even the smallest movement still hurts, but I bite back the ache rocketing through my limbs long enough to sit down on the couch and gently tug her over by the wrist. We used to be at eye level like this, her standing and me sittting. Now I have to look up, plaintive in some weirdly fitting sort of way. “I promise that nothin’ bad is gonna happen to Jean, okay? Cross my heart and hope to die.”

“Why should I believe you?”

“Well, there’s a long list of people who’ll tell you that you probably shouldn’t, Eren Jaeger being at the top of it,” I grumble, wondering how weak I’ve gotten that the waylaid faith of a nine-year-old is enough to wound me. But in the wake of that thought, an idea takes root in my mind, and I give her hand a little squeeze before letting go and looking at her over steepled fingers. “But if you want, we can handle this like a business transaction. You know what collateral is?”

Ninette frowns, fixing me with a skeptical look. “It’s something you give the bank, I know that much.”

“Right. See, when the bank loans you money, you put something up as collateral for it. Sometimes it’s a house, or a car, something important to you. You’re promising the bank that you’ll take care of what they gave you and give it back the same way it was when you got it, and if you don’t, they keep your collateral.”

“You wanna give me collateral for my brother,” she deadpans.

I shrug, kicking my feet up on the coffee table and trying not to wince. “If you’ll accept it, yeah.”

Ninette seems to mull it over for a minute, looking between Jean and me a few times before she crosses her arms tightly over her chest and nods her head sharply. “What’ll you give me?”

“Well, I ain’t got much by way of material goods at the moment,” I tell her, counting off my necessities and possessions on one hand. “I need the car. I need the clothes on my back. I need what money I got. But we can think of something.”

“It don’t gotta be something big. You said something important, right? Something that means a lot to you?”

What do I have that means a lot to me? Jean, obviously, but he’s the one I’m bargaining for at the moment. And before him, there were only my plans, my delusions of grandeur and the schemes I wove to achieve them. Before him, there was only gunpowder and car chases, sprinting footfalls across a prison yard, Connie’s ragged breaths beside me, the shadows of a burglarized house and the hum of a stolen engine. There’s no way to take all those plans and give them to her, no material vessel that holds all they represent.

Well. Maybe there is.

Smirking, I yank the worn old newsboy cap off my head and place it carefully on hers, tilting it to the side so it sits crookedly on top of her messy blonde hair. "Why, I think it looks perfect on you, Miss Ninette."

She runs her fingers contemplatively over the brim of the cap, lips pressed into a thin line. “And this means you gotta bring him back safe.”

“You have my solemn vow.”

“We need to go,” Jean whispers, looking out the front window even though there are no headlights coming down the street. “God knows when Mom and Eren’ll get back, and that’s a conversation I don’t wanna have.”

I can’t fault him there, humming in assent and hauling myself off the couch with a choked little groan of pain as Jean walks back over and pulls his sister into his arms, a hand smoothing down the hair that the cap’s ruffled into a mess. I’m glad that I can’t see his face from this angle. I’ve watched him break on my behalf enough times without adding this to the list.

“I won’t tell anyone I saw you,” Ninette croaks, fighting tears again and valiantly wiping at her eyes when she takes a step back.

“Thank you,” Jean sighs in relief, bending over and pressing a quick kiss to her forehead. “Now, listen. You gotta follow three rules while I’m gone. Rule number one, you stay in school. No cuttin’ class, no dropping out to get a job selling newspapers or something. Rule number two, no fightin’...”

Nettie lets out a wordless squawk of protest.

“...unless Tom Wagner hits you first, and if that’s the case, you kick his ass,” he finishes, grinning. “And rule number three, I want you to mind--”

“Mind Ma, yeah, I know.”

“No, minding Mom is implied.” Shaking his head, Jean bends down to her level again, cradling her face between his palms. “I want you to mind Eren. He promised me that he’d take care of you and Mom if I was ever gone. You remind him of that promise. And if he tells you to do something, you do it, understand?”

“Yeah, yeah,” she rolls her eyes, shoving Jean’s shoulder with a smirk I can tell she doesn’t quite mean. “Get outta here, knucklehead. You’re the worst outlaw ever.”

“Well, I got time to practice. I love you, kiddo.” Jean hugs her again before standing up and making his way over to the front door, pausing on the threshold and just sort of staring around the place.

I never had the chance to look at what I was leaving behind, dodging blows as I left and running until my legs couldn’t hold me up anymore. And standing here, watching him, I begin to wonder if I didn’t almost have it better. I didn’t have time to think of what I’d lost until it was already out of my reach, didn’t have to tear myself away because that had already been done for me. Jean has a different sort of strength than getting up from a beating and walking away with your head held high. He’s got the kind of strength it takes to stand there and watch everything he has right in front of him, to make the decision to turn around and walk down the porch steps with a shaky breath and a muttered “I’ll be sure to write.”

For all the weakness I’ve gained because of Jean, I’ve only seen him get stronger. It’s a strange dichotomy, this give-and-take spiral of loving and letting go that we’ve tugged ourselves into, but I can’t help but think that freedom looks good on him even through his heavy heart, a spark in him that wasn’t there before. It’s dim beneath the sadness that weighs him down on the way to the car, but it’s there. And it’s beautiful. And he’s beautiful. And this is what we have now, no second guesses or turning back.

Our choice is to keep living, or don’t. Jean chose life over a decades-long suffocation in Dallas. And that, that’s enough to make me a little braver in the face of all the blackened memories tugging me backwards to Eastham and the things I’m telling myself that I don’t remember.

“I can drive if you want,” I offer, noticing how tightly he’s gripping the wheel once we get back on the road headed south.

“No.” Jean shakes his head, staring intensely at the small circle of road in the headlights and nudging the speedometer a little higher. “No, I want to. I’ll drive ‘til I’m tired and we’ll find somewhere to stay.”

It’s a clear night with a bright moon, but I don’t say anything about the way it catches the wet lines across his cheekbones thirty minutes out of Dallas. Sometimes we don’t want to be alone with our weaknesses. I reach over after another mile and rest my hand over his on the gearshift, and he clings back like I’m a lifeline he has no idea is fraying by the second.

We’ve chosen to live. Now it’s just a matter of figuring out how to do it with both of us broken and more lost than we’ll admit.

Somewhere to stay ends up being some roadside motel outside of Huntsville that looks like it’s seen better days. Jean handles the checking in since he’s the one who doesn’t look like he’s gotten on the wrong side of a prizefighter, and I sit in the car until he comes back swinging a clunky keychain around his finger and opens door number 12 with a flourish. I don’t have any bags to haul in with me, but my body feels heavy enough, shoulders slumped by the time I make it in out of the dusty night. The room’s got faded carpet and peeling wallpaper, but there’s an inviting-looking double bed made up against the far wall, something Jean and I both stop and look at for a few seconds, the implications of it sitting unspoken between us until he breaks the silence.

“Guess I don’t have to go sleep on the couch tonight,” he breathes, running a hand over the threadbare duvet before bringing it up to press against the spot on my ribcage where why heartbeat thrums the loudest.

“Guess not,” I nod, but before I have time to say anything else his lips are on mine and everything blurs into a heated confusion, my bruised jaw aching sweetly beneath his touch and split lips stinging where they meet his. It’s not as graceless as the frantic kiss back in the cell block, more calculated, more careful. Jean’s taking his time, and for a moment, I’m inclined to let him.

But then in some odd time skip my shirt’s ended up on the floor and there are fingertips skating up my spine and oh God no what not again--

Panic. Blind, knee-jerk reaction panic that slams into me with lethal force. This is what jumping off a skyscraper must be like. My bones shake and I feel my insides liquify before they _convulse_ , arms flailing wildly until I’m out of the grip that holds me and a good five yards away, gasping for air and fighting the bitter sting of bile rising in my throat. My heart is slamming against my eardrums with loud, wet thumps and nothing makes _sense_ , surroundings blurring, iron bars and ugly wallpaper, concrete and carpet, and I don’t know where I am, I don’t…

“Marco? Sweetheart, are you okay?”

Jean. That’s where I am. That’s who I’m with. The panic doesn’t disappear, but it dissipates, becomes manageable. I suck in a ragged breath and shake my head, grasping for words. “I’m…”

I’m not even close to okay and I haven’t been since they put me in that hellhole. I’m not telling you even a fraction of what happened in there and I don’t ever intend to because knowing the truth would break you like living it broke me. I’m scared that I came out of there a different person than the one who went in, and I’m starting to think that I’ve just been putting Old Me on like a costume to stay functional. I’m scared. I’m lost. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.

“I’m gonna go take a bath,” I choke out, running a hand through my hair and cringing at how dirty it is. “I’m disgusting right now. Nice long soak’ll do me good.”

I run the water so hot that steam clogs up the bathroom and I feel like the skin is about to scald right off my bones, and it doesn’t do me any good. I grab a washcloth and scrub until there’s no more dirt or dried blood and I’m raw and pink and look like I’ve been flayed alive, and it doesn’t do me any good. I wash my hair three times and watch the soap bubbles pop in the water one by one, and it doesn’t do me any good. The water goes murky with all the grime, and even though my head’s well above the top of the tub I still feel like I’m drowning, still feel five months that I’m trying so hard not to remember crawling under my skin.

I chose to live, but it’s a harder decision than it sounds when you’ve been dead inside for a long damn time.

Somewhere between that realization and the last bit of soap fading out into the dirty water, the full impact hits, the levee breaks, all the walls I put up in my head long enough to get me out of Eastham and out of immediate danger crumble like paper beneath a tidal wave, and I don’t even notice the horrid, gasping, would-be screams clawing up my throat until they start to hurt, curled up in a chipped porcelain tub with my head pressed to my knees and trying for all I’m worth to yank the hair right out of my head.

The door to the bathroom opening doesn’t process, and I’m too far into my own head to recognize the hands prying my fingers off my scalp until I’ve already flown into a borderline-animalistic fight to get them off and slopped half the water out of the tub, fighting until Jean’s voice cuts through the terror, “Hey, you’re okay, you’re okay, it’s me, you’re safe, you’re okay.”

It’s like clicking a switch. A breaker blowing. Instant shutdown.

There’s no resistance as I somehow end up pulled to my feet and wrapped in some ungodly mess of towels and led back into the room, dressed like some sort of living doll and tucked under blankets curled up against Jean’s chest. I don’t think I blink once the entire time, eyes wide and vacant until something flips the switch again and I start shaking, clinging to his shirt and sucking in deep gulps of air.

Sometimes we don’t want to be alone with our weaknesses.

“You’re okay now,” he whispers, and I don’t have the heart to call him a liar, to tell him that he hasn’t quite gotten what he signed up for. “We’re gonna do everything we said we were. You and me. You’re safe and you’re _out_ , Marco, you’re outta there, okay, just breathe.”

Am I? Am I really? Being shattered was never part of the plan. I never factored in time to spend putting myself back together, and shivering under worn-out blankets in a shitty motel room doesn’t seem like any kind of place to start doing it. You can’t put yourself together without finding a solid place to do it, and I can’t stay in one place for too long without falling apart. I am a paradox. I am the worst kind of paradox, and I am doomed to functional brokenness at my absolute best.

“I’ll never get out, Jean,” I whisper into the dark hours later, not even sure if he’s asleep or not. “I’ll never get out.”

My best shot is running with everything I’ve got in me and praying that eventually I’ll find a door.

 


	14. Jean

We spend the next few days holed up in the motel room, sleeping and playing cards and running back and forth for shitty food from the run-down diner across the street. Marco protests, swears up and down that we need to get on the road, but I don’t have to tell him that we can only get so far when he falls apart at the seams at the slightest provocation. He sees it well enough for himself. Whatever happened in those five months at Eastham broke him, and while a few days isn’t enough for him to put himself back together - there’s a place in me that houses a silent terror of him never being able to fully do that - they’re at least enough to keep him from breaking like he did the first night. He still jumps at sudden noises, still sleeps with his back against the wall and his arms locked around me like he’s afraid I’ll slip away at some point during the night. There are still times where I’ll catch him staring into an empty space as if there’s something there I can’t see. For every muttered _I’m okay_ there’s a heaping pile of evidence to the contrary, and I don’t know what hurts worse, the fact that I can’t do anything about it now or the fact that I could have done something about it five months ago.

Sometimes I’ll lie in bed with his heartbeat beneath my ear and look across the room to where my trumpet case sits in the corner with all those unopened letters inside, a monument to my own cowardice. I will never throw them away. They’ll stay there as a reminder of how I could have stopped all of this before it even began. Even if the guilt eats me alive, at least I won’t make that mistake again.

Compared to the Marco I thought I knew, the one that curls up beside me at night is subdued, almost a shell of himself. There are sparks of the old him during the day - he’ll laugh when he hands my ass to me in poker for the tenth time in a row, crack stupid jokes about how I’m an outlaw, not a babysitter - but as soon as it gets dark out he seems to shrink into himself. He stays still in bed with hollow eyes that eventually close beneath the weight of fatigue, slips unwillingly into his dreams only to claw his way out of them in the wee hours of the morning with ragged gasps and shaking hands that knot up in the sheets, curled in on himself until long moments of me whispering simple facts - _you’re with me, you’re safe, we’re in Huntsville, you’re okay, I’m right here_ \- remind him of reality and he relaxes, mumbles an apology and goes back to sleep. The fear that he’ll slip away sometime during the night doesn’t seem irrational, not when I can practically feel the hollowness beneath his skin and the pull of whatever nightmares he has pulling him away to somewhere I can’t reach him.

That’s probably why when I wake up to the other side of the bed empty and cold, my entire body seizes up in paralyzing panic.

A second of confusion, an eternity of fear, and my feet are on the floor, blankets slumping down around my ankles. “Marco?”

Silence. Stuttering footsteps and my hand slamming against the bathroom door to swing it open. “Marco?”

Cold tile and a smudged mirror, the steady drip of a faucet. Empty. Oh God. Oh _God_.

Breath crawls out of my lungs in a tight wheeze, fingers shaking as I jump into my jeans and button my shirt up crooked, lunging for the door. Have to check the parking lot, make sure the car’s still there. God knows where he’s gotten to while I’ve been sleeping. Stupid, stupid, the least I could have done was watch him. He hasn’t been himself and it was my fault and my responsibility to hold him together, and I slept. I slept, and now--

“Woah, easy, darlin’.” I smack headlong into Marco on my way out the door, blinking in confusion as I get my bearings and look up at him. Clean-shaven and fully dressed, even looks like he’s gotten his hair trimmed from its shaggy post-Eastham state back into its normal style. He takes a fleeting look down the long porch that makes up the outside of the motel before he lays a hand in the curve of my neck, thumb brushing over the hinge of my jaw. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Well, no. It was waking up and not seeing one that scared me.

I don’t say anything until after I’ve tugged him back into the room, closing the door and leaning into him with a shaky exhalation. “I got up and you were gone; scared the shit outta me.”

“Didn’t wanna wake you. You looked tuckered out,” he hums, stiffening at the contact for a moment before he relaxes and twines his arms around me, steady, secure, something I haven’t seen from him in days. “I should’ve left a note or something. Had to go out and run some errands.”

“Errands?”

“Yeah, errands. Like gettin’ my damn mop of hair cut halfway decently, for one.” He reaches up and ruffles his own hair until it’s a cloud of black locks sticking up every which way. “And, y’know. Picking up a new ride.”

“You stole another car?” I gulp.

Marco laughs almost giddily, grabbing my hand and tugging me over to the window. “I stole a _better_ car. Take a look at this.”

Sitting in the space just outside the door is the sleekest car I’ve ever seen, black paint shining in the sun and polished chrome hubcaps gleaming even through the dust. For a moment, I forget everything in this storm of shit dragging down at my mind and just let my inner mechanic take over, jaw dropping slightly. “Is that… fuck _me_ , that’s a Ford V8.”

“That’s a 1934 Ford V8 four-door deluxe phaeton. Top comes down, nice leather interior, all that jazz,” Marco nods with an almost-feral grin, slapping his hand down on the windowsill before turning away and digging a cigarette out of his pocket. He smirks at me through a plume of smoke, shrugging offhandedly as he presses on with the specifications. “Although you might be more interested in the sixty-five horses under the hood and the _top speed of eighty goddamn miles per hour._ ”

“Jesus,” I breathe, gaping out the window with my fingers already itching to go out and yank the thing’s hood up.

“You know who drove one of these fine pieces of machinery? John Dillinger, that’s who.” There’s self-satisfaction in every move he makes, walking up behind me to wrap an arm around my waist and perch his chin on my shoulder. “Ain’t no cop car that can catch us in that thing. Not with me behind the wheel. You’ll be pleased to know that I also took the liberty of liftin’ a few license plates from around town. We can switch ‘em out, avoid anyone finding the number of a stolen car. Ditched the Model T outside of town in a junkyard. We’re golden, darlin’. Twenty-four-carats _golden_.”

This is the Marco I met in July, all bold promises and endearments rolling off a quicksilver tongue. He grins and leans against the doorframe and twirls a keyring around his finger, and something aches in my chest.

I’ve spent all this time wanting him to come back to me, and now that he’s here I can’t help but feel like it’s some sort of act. The Cheshire Cat smile and honeyed words in my ear don’t seem to fit on the lips that wrapped around sobs and frightened murmurs in the middle of the night.

“So d’you wanna take her for a spin or what? C’mon, get your stuff. I wanna be in Houston before nightfall.” Marco leans in and gives me a quick peck on the lips before he’s out the door again, and I’m left in the wake of some sort of miracle or incredibly successful act, blinking at the swirling dust motes where he’d been standing moments ago. I don’t question it. Questioning things takes too much time, and time is a luxury that we no longer have. Instead, I pack up my spare clothes and my toothbrush and run a hand over the side of my trumpet case, walk out and set it down in the back seat of the V8, almost feeling the paper of all those unopened letters beneath my palm.

I wonder if it’s possible to bleed to death from five months of papercuts I never even gave myself the chance to get.

A while later, I muse that it’s a weird time to realize that I’ve never been in a car with Marco driving before, given the fact that the thought is interspersed between frantic prayers and a constant mantra of _oh shit oh shit oh shit_ blaring across my brain. He drives like a _madman_ , grinning widely the whole time as he nudges the engine up dangerously close to all those sixty-five horses can give him without blowing out. We whip around a corner going well over seventy, and I swear the damn car literally tilts up on two wheels. Knuckles white where I’m gripping the edge of my seat, I turn over to Marco and croak, “Is this really necessary?”

“Just puttin’ her through her paces!” He responds, slamming the gas pedal down with a joyful whoop and leaving a trail of dust in a vortex behind us along with burnt skids of rubber and what feels like a good portion of my insides.

“I’m gonna hurl.” My face is probably the closest to being truly green it’ll ever get.

“Don’t be a baby.”

“You’ll say that ‘til I ruin this nice leather interior.”

He slows down at that, albeit with a grumpy little frown.

Once I’m not actively fearing for my life, I can calm down enough to look at Marco and really _see_ him, taking in how all of his bruises have faded to light blues and sickly yellows, the way that his smiles are belied by the stiffness still clinging to his shoulders and the shadow that crosses his eyes every once in a while. I don’t know how to address it, don’t know what to say that won’t result in me falling into a downward spiral of my own guilt, which won’t help either of us. But the silence is heavy, and for every mile the speedometer drops it seems like Marco curls into himself a little more, bowing under an invisible weight.

“You seem better today,” I finally rush out, telling myself that it’s not quite a lie. “Better than you been for the past few days.”

He looks out the windshield and squints into the light, the gradually setting sun making his hazel eyes flash an indescribable golden-green. “Couldn’t stay holed up in that motel forever.”

“No, but we could’ve stayed a few more days if you needed it.” This is what passes for diplomacy with me. Friendly suggestions that don’t really do much to mask what I’m really trying to say. Words aren’t really my strong point.

“You tryin’ to say that I needed it?”

“No, that ain’t what I meant.”

Yes it is.

Marco sucks in a deep breath through his nose, lips pressing themselves into a thin slash across his face before he gives me a sidelong glance and turns down a seemingly innocuous dirt road. “There’s no progress in stagnancy, Jean. When bad shit happens, you gotta pick yourself up and go. Stayin’ still just makes it all hit harder. Trust me. I’ve had enough bad shit in my life that I can speak from experience.”

“Okay,” I mutter, deciding to drop the subject. Marco has more authority to speak on the mechanics of being a functioning disaster than I do. After all, I’ve never been very good at it to begin with. He seems to make it a profession.

It goes quiet again for a few moments. Marco clears his throat and says, “I still can’t believe you busted me outta that place with an unloaded gun.”

“You still on about that?” I snort, grabbing his hand when he lets go of the gearshift and giving it a little squeeze.

“You’re damn right I’m still on about it.” He shakes his head with a little huff. “Just walking in there with the safety on. It’s like you’ve never shot a pistol in your life.”

I laugh nervously.

Marco’s head snaps around so quickly that I can almost hear his neck crack. “Jean.”

My laughter ratchets up another half-octave.

Marco slumps back in his seat, shaking his head. “Unbe-fuckin’-lievable.”

“I’ve shot a rifle before,” I offer lamely. “Once.”

“Very impressive, Annie Oakley.”

"You got outta there regardless," I huff, crossing my arms over my chest.

"That ain't the issue," he sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose and turning down another unmarked road. He's avoiding the more traveled path, I realize, taking the roundabout way to Houston to avoid being seen. Marco navigates this countryside like he knows it, whipping around corners and cutting across fallow fields like he doesn't even have to think about it. And there was the fact that he knew his way around Huntsville well enough to find a barbershop and somewhere to lift a car. We're driving through his old stomping grounds, no doubt about it. I think back to his hasty story about the mysterious contact in Houston and start to feel a little antsy against my will.

Marco seems to sense this, resting a hand on my knee and laughing, “Just gonna have to get you trained up, is all.”

“There’s no need for that.” I felt sick just holding the damn thing. Shooting it would probably send me into a full-fledged breakdown.

“Bullshit.” The Ford jumps on its chassis when Marco drives too fast over a bump in the road, veering off towards a farmhouse that’s clearly been abandoned for some time, just another one of the innumerable foreclosures we’ve passed between Eastham and here. He rams a foot down on the brake just short of a dry-rotted barn door, whipping over and looking at me with more conviction in his eyes than I’ve seen since this summer, sharp and intense as they hold my gaze. “Lotta miles between here and New York, Jean. There’s gonna be money we’ll have to shell out for gas, for food, for hotels. We’re gonna have to do a couple jobs at the very least, and I’ll be _damned_ if I let you go into ‘em so green that you don’t even know how to shoot a gun proficiently.”

“But you know how to shoot--”

“It ain’t about what I know how to do! You gotta be able to look out for yourself in case something happens and I’m not there to look out for you!”

The inside of the car goes very quiet, only the hum of the engine to fill the still air as Marco looks at me for a long stretch, something raw in his expression that looks like he wants to regret saying it but can’t. And me, I’m just busy trying to fight the sinking weight in my chest at the implication. All this time, all these sweeping decisions, and I’m still trying to keep my head above water.

“Then don’t get yourself shot or arrested,” I whisper.

Marco makes a point of turning away from me. “Go see if you can get that barn door open.”

There must have been squatters here before us, because the rusty padlock that had been on the door before is now laying in the dust somewhere off to the side, the old wood rattling on its track when I slide the door open far enough for Marco to pull the car into the barn, cutting the engine with a sharp jerk of his hand and climbing out onto the creaking floorboards. Definitely a hideout for squatters, although they look to be long gone, empty tin cans and wads of trash littering the corners, imprints of bedrolls in the dust on the floor. Marco makes a quick sweep of the barn, picking up an armful of cans and bottles as he goes, still not looking at me.

“What’re those for?” I ask.

When he raises his head, there’s a smile pulling at his lips that sends a chill straight down my spinal column. “Target practice.”

We end up standing several yards back from a sagging fence outside the barn, the trash from inside perched on every fencepost like some sort of bizarre monument. Marco pulls the Colt out of his waistband and loads it with an ease that says he’s done it a thousand times, presses the weight of it into my hand before he flicks what I assume is the safety off. “Okay, darlin’. Take your best shot.”

It was seven in the morning the day after my sixteenth birthday. I was still a little drunk from the bottle of champagne Mom had let me have all to myself the night before, my dreams soft-edged and amorphous until they shattered with a bang that sounded like a thunderclap right down the hallway. I sat up in bed and tried to make sense of it through the footsteps and scuffle in the hallway, thought I was still trapped in my dreams until Mom started screaming.

I sway a little on my feet, biting back the taste of copper in my mouth as I curl my finger around the trigger and point the revolver straight in front of me. It’s not hard to shoot one of these things at a range of barrel-to-mouth. That’s all I really know about guns. But hitting a bottle from ten yards away?

I pull back on the trigger hard, the gun going off with a blaze of light and sound and jumping in my hand so much that my wrist pulls back with a protesting crack of overextended cartilage and I let out a mixed wheeze of panic and pain. Somehow the gun ends up on the ground and I end up clutching my knees in an effort to stay on my feet, eyes screwed tightly shut.

The bottle’s still sitting pretty on the fence, and absolutely no one is surprised.

“Good first try,” says Marco, scooping the abandoned revolver up without so much as a blink. God, he really is a good liar. A steady hand rubs soothing circles into the nape of my neck until I can stand upright again, swallowing the lump in my throat and sticking out my hand for the gun. Discomfort or no, he’s right. I told him to stop treating me like an accessory and start treating me like an accomplice, and that won’t be possible until I can walk the walk. It’s almost gentle, the way he places the grip back against my palm, wraps my fingers around one in time with his instructions. “All right, hold the grip firmly with your right hand, index finger outside the trigger guard, thumb pointin’ forward in line with the barrel. Don’t have a loose grip or the kick’ll knock the gun back and break your nose when you shoot.”

“Like this?” I ask, holding my arm out in front of me with a grip on the gun that’s probably too tight.

“Good. Keep that arm straight, but don’t lock your elbow. Look down your sights and line it up with the bottom of your target to compensate for the kick. And we gotta fix your stance,” he hums, walking a tight circle around me and pressing a palm to the dip of my back just below my shoulderblades. “You carry too much tension here. It’ll throw off your aim.”

Any tension in my body when he’s talking in that low murmur has nothing to do with the way I’m standing, and Marco fucking knows it.

“Don’t be afraid of the gun, Jean,” he practically purrs, rough fingertips tracing the tendons popping out in my forearm from my death grip on the pistol until they start to recede. “When no one’s holding it, it’s just a hunk of metal. When you’re holding it, you’re in control of what it does.”

God help me, I never stood a chance. I swallow hard, give my head a little shake to clear the haze. “You said something about fixing my stance.”

“Yeah, you shouldn’t stand parallel to the target. It makes you easier to shoot and it makes your aim veer right. Think of your body as a perpendicular line. Line your hips up this way.”

His thumbs hook securely through the belt loops of my jeans, and all I can think of as he swivels me around so that my back is to him and pulls my hips flush against his is that Marco could throw me around like a ragdoll if he had half a mind to. That thought should not do the things to me that it does. My arm drops slightly in the wake of all my bodily awareness dropping to the task of avoiding a really goddamned inconvenient half chub in the middle of a field with a loaded gun in my hand. Marco just chuckles, lips ghosting against the shell of my ear. “Mind your aim, darlin’.”

“Are we really doing this right now?” I hiss, irritated enough at the smugness in his voice that I grind back against him out of pure spite, earning a sharp little inhalation and his grip tightening as his hands slide up to the sides of my waist. Smirking, I tilt my head back and press a kiss to the underside of his jaw, muffling a breathy little laugh against his warm skin. “Ain’t you s’posed to be teaching me how to shoot, lover boy?”

“I’m helpin’ you relax,” Marco replies, the picture of innocence with wide, doelike eyes and an almost wounded pout that definitely doesn’t match the clever fingers fiddling with the untucked hem of my shirt and slipping beneath the fabric to trace nonsensical patterns along the top of my waistband. “You won’t hit the broad side of a barn with how wound up you are.”

“Sure, that’s it.”

“I’m offended by your lack of faith in me.” A fleeting kiss to the curve of my neck before his voice is right back in my ear again, murmuring instructions that I follow as if compelled by some higher power. “All right, just bring up your arm nice and slow. Take your time, breathe, and when you’re ready, gently squeeze the trigger. Don’t think of it as pullin’ or your shot’ll go wide. Just calmly, slowly--”

_BANG._

“Jesus!” Marco jumps about a foot in the air, caught off guard for a moment as he takes a look over at the fence. The bottle is nothing but a pile of scattered shards in the dust. “I’ll be goddamned.”

“Guess it really was just my stance,” I laugh and grin over at him, tongue poking out between my teeth.

“Yeah, yeah. Beginner’s luck. Do it again.”

“With or without you feelin’ me up?”

“Without. No help this time.” He looks nothing short of petulant.

Eyes narrowing in concentration, I shift my aim to the can on the fencepost immediately to my right. Marco was right. Now that I’ve gotten past the cold paralysis in my veins every time the gun touches my skin, there’s a weird sort of assurance in holding it. There’s a certain power. Pull a trigger over here, blow something away over there. It feels almost good, running through the steps in my head. Tight grip. Line up the aim. Gently squeeze.

_BANG._

The can goes flying off into the air. “What was that about beginner’s luck?”

“Shootin’ a couple cans off a fence from ten yards don’t make you Jesse James,” Marco scoffs, taking the Colt from my hand with a slow, cocky grin unfurling at the corners of his mouth. “You wanna see a real professional? Go get the rest of them cans.”

Grumbling under my breath about showoffs and undermining raw talent, I shuffle over to the fence and snatch up the remaining two tin cans, walking back over to where Marco’s backed up a few paces, idly spinning the cylinder of the revolver. He pops it open to check where the last three bullets are before clicking it shut again and twirling the gun around his finger by the trigger guard like some scene out of an Old West movie. “Throw a can.”

I blink at him. “What?”

“Just take one and throw it,” he says, clicking the safety off and squinting against the sunlight. “Lob it up as high as you can.”

Not really sure where he’s going with this, standing with the gun held loosely at his hip, I shrug and toss one of the cans up with a little grunt of effort, the empty cylinder turning over and over in midair.

It’s like seeing lightning, like watching a rattlesnake strike. Before I can even process the motion, Marco’s arm blurs, there’s a bang, and the can spins frantically higher, falling down in the dust with a hollow clang, a bullet hole punched visibly through it even from across the barnyard.

“Holy shit,” I say.

“Wanna try it?” Marco says.

“Nah, I’ll pass.”

“Then throw the other one.”

I try to chuck the second can a little harder this time, make the arc a little wider, but Marco compensates for it in less than the blink of an eye, shooting it midair and watching the dizzying spiral for another half a second before he pulls the trigger again. The second can comes down with two bullet holes.

“Where the hell did you learn how to shoot like that?” I gape, too amazed to even roll my eyes when he blows the nonexistent smoke off the end of the barrel and tucks the Colt back into his jeans.

“Always sorta had the knack for it,” Marco shrugs, flexing his hand and leaning over to pick up one of his fallen targets. “And I had good teachers. My oldest brother’s a Texas Ranger.”

I laugh, but the sound sputters out when I catch the look he gives me. “You’re serious?”

“Yeah. Miles joined up when he was eighteen, yeah, got married and moved his girl Emily and their kids down to Austin. Far as I know, they’re still there. Why do you look surprised?”

“It’s just…” Not knowing how to word it politely, I just shrug and scuff my foot through the dusty earth, kicking up a little cloud. “Well, you don’t really talk about your family. I guess I just didn’t think you and your brothers went in such different directions.”

That haunted look crawls back into his eyes again, and I’m half-ready for him to spiral into that same unreachable place he goes at night, but he just shrugs and throws the can down, his voice soft when he speaks again. “My folks and I differ on lots of things.”

I don’t press it any more. He looks grateful that I don’t. After a moment, the tension in his shoulders relaxes, and he walks over to pull me into his arms, leaning down until our foreheads and noses are pressed together. It’s peaceful, the ability to simply be with him, standing under the open sky and not worrying who’s watching. There’s nothing but the even, synced in-out of our breaths and the insistent thrum of his heartbeat beneath the palm I press to his chest.

And then there’s the sound of tires on dirt.

“You hear that?” I frown, turning around, but Marco’s already beaten me to seeing the distant cloud of dust down the road. A car, coming in fast.

 _“Shit.”_ A stream of unintelligible cursing hissing between his teeth, he runs over to the fence to pick up the rest of the intact trash-targets and waves me back towards the barn. “Go, go!”

We both sprint for the barn, crouching next to a crack in the wall and watching the dust cloud move closer. The rumble of an engine rises from the distance, but the car shoots right past us and up the road in the direction we came from. Police car.

“Fuckin’ hell, that was close,” I breathe, leaning against the old wood, but Marco’s already up and digging the car keys out of his pocket.

“C’mon,” he says. “If that wasn’t a sign for us to make tracks, I don’t know what was.”

It’s selfish for me to crave that one moment that slipped away all too soon, the quiet joy of just existing, so I don’t complain as I climb back into the passenger seat, try not to feel sad leaving behind the very first place I’ve ever been with Marco and not felt scared. He grabs my hand again once we’re back out on the road, and it helps.

“You ever been to Houston?” he asks after several miles.

I shake my head. “Never been that far south before. Is it nice?”

“It’s a shithole,” Marco says flatly, a slow smile cracking his composure. “You’re gonna love it.”

* * *

Houston doesn’t seem that bad, but I don’t have much frame of reference from the inside of a car. It’s almost dark by the time we roll into town, and night’s completely fallen when Marco finally parks the car and tells me to grab my shit and hop out. We’re parked along the street in front of what appears to be an accounting office, already closed for the night.

Wait,” I frown, scooping my trumpet case up in my arms and jogging to keep up with him. “Where are we going?”

“To meet that contact I was tellin’ you about.” Marco has the paper bag full of cash from the pawnshop clutched tightly in one hand, and I can see the other drifting repetitively to his waistband s he leads me around the corner of the block of shops and down a narrow alley. Testing his reaction time. Seeing how fast he can pull a gun if he has to. The idea of bullets flying doesn’t help my already-prominent sense of unease about this whole plan. “Just stick with me and keep your smart mouth in check and you’ll be fine.”

 _Trust me, I won’t mouth off to someone who’s likely to kill me,_ I want to tell him, _that seems like more your area of expertise,_ but saying that would prove him right, so I bite my tongue and stay on his heels down to the end of the alley, nothing but a dumpster and a grimy old door in the wall beside it. Probably a storage room for the offices up front.

Or at least, I think that’s what it is until Marco stops, knocks out a complicated rhythm against the rusty metal, and a latch slides back in the door, revealing a pair of beady eyes and a deep, booming voice that says, “Well, look what the cat dragged in.”

“I dragged myself in, Reiner, now open the fuckin’ door,” Marco snaps back, rolling his eyes. So much for keeping smart mouths in check.

Something on the other side of the door - a deadbolt lock, most likely - clunks loudly before it swings open, giving way to a ridiculously tall blonde guy who’s built like a damned refrigerator stuffed in a tailored suit. I may or may not gulp audibly. Marco, however, seems unfazed, grabbing me by the collar and hauling me inside when I don’t enter of my own accord.

“Been a while, Marco,” refrigerator guy - Reiner? - rumbles, crossing his arms and staring down at us. Hands like fucking meathooks. He could snap us both in half. I’m about to be the casualty of a bad mobster movie.

“Yeah, well, I had a couple unfortunate run-ins with the law, or I’d have been back to look at your pretty face way sooner,” Marco snorts, ignoring the desperate, wide-eyed _what-the-fuck-are-you-doing_ look I shoot his way. This is how it ends. I should have told Mom I loved her before I left.

Reiner stares us both down for a few more seconds before apparently deciding not to kill us, opting instead to jerk his head in my direction and ask, “Where’s Connie?”

“Busted outta McLennan County lockup with me, but his woman talked him into turnin’ himself back in.” I’m glad Marco’s doing the talking. If I had to focus on doing anything with my body other than standing still, I might lose the muscle control it’s taking to keep me from shitting my pants.

“Dumbass.” Shaking his head, Reiner leans over and locks the door, leaning his gargantuan frame against the old metal. “You realize you got someone here who’ll wanna see you, right?”

“That’s what I came here for.”

“Then you’re an even bigger dumbass than Connie.”

Marco practically has to drag me along when Reiner turns around to lead us back a narrow hallway towards the muffled sound of swing music and laughter. Through Herculean effort, I manage to squeak out a few words. “So he’s not the contact?”

A drumbeat and a trombone slide, and Marco throws his head back and laughs. “Hell no. My contact makes Reiner here look like a goddamn teddy bear.”

All voluntary muscle control goes back to preventing a horrifying shit-in-pants incident.

Reiner opens another door, and the dingy hallway gives way to a lush room of polished woods and velvet drapes, linen-draped tables populated by men and women dressed to the nines, clothes finer than anything I’ve seen since I was wearing threads like theirs. A long, well-stocked bar occupies one side of the room, a packed dance floor and a stage the other, sporting whirling couples and a lively band. It’s a cacophony of music and laughing and clinking glasses, unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.

“What is this place?” I hiss, dragging Marco down close enough to hear me as we cut through the crowd.

“A den of sin and depravity,” he deadpans, waving his arm around in a grandiose gesture. “Or, as you might know it, a speakeasy.”

I’ve been confused since we walked in, but now I’m up to a whole other level. “What’s the point of a speakeasy? Prohibition’s been repealed for a year.”

“Prohibition or no, people are always gonna have vices, Jean,” Marco shrugs, the low light of the bar casting every one of his freckles into sharp relief. “And they come here to get ‘em. Officially, this place is a jazz bar. But if you know what door to knock on, you can walk outta here with just about anything.”

“So is that why we’re here?”

His lips purse, and for a moment, he almost looks scared. “We’re here to talk to the one who opens the door. The one holding all the keys. Who d’you think runs Houston?”

“The mayor?” I offer.

Marco laughs. “You’re about to get your answer. This place is just the cover. The real action happens downstairs.”

Downstairs ends up being a narrow staircase tucked behind a rich red curtain, lit by wall sconces and ending in an intricately carved mahogany door. Reiner stops halfway down and extends a hand behind him without even turning around. “Gun, Bodt.”

“I don’t have an earthly idea what you’re talkin’ about,” Marco says innocently.

“Bullshit. You either got a .45 down your pants or you’re real happy to see me. Don’t make me take it from you.”

Marco grumbles and hands the revolver over so we can continue our descent. Reiner has to duck to keep his head from hitting the ceiling once we reach the door, looking back at Marco and shaking his head as he slides a key in the lock. “You poor bastard.”

“Oh God,” I whisper.

“God can’t save you from what’s on the other side of that door, Tiny.”

The room on the other side of the door is much smaller than the bar upstairs. It’s really more of a lounge, a cluster of a rich brocade loveseat and two armchairs in one corner and a small wet bar with two stools in another. My confusion ratchets up another rung on the ladder as Reiner steps back against the wall beside the door and I get a better look around. There’s a door on the other side of the room, but there’s no hulking mob boss with a Tommy gun waiting anywhere to blow Marco and I to smithereens. There’s just a petite lady in a shimmering red cocktail dress and a mink stole perched on one of the barstools nursing a martini, perfectly-set pin curls of blonde hair obscuring her face with the angle she’s sitting at, turned away from us.

“Is that his dame?” I ask softly.

“Shut up, Jean,” says Marco, looking mortified.

Hearing the noise, the woman at the bar swivels around on her stool. She’s beautiful, although perhaps not in the conventional sense, a hawkish nose and eyes of such a clear, icy blue that they’re a little hard to look into for more than a second. She takes in the three of us standing there and breaks into the sweetest of smiles, which, for some reason, scares the shit out of me. It doesn’t look right on her face even though it matches the warm alto practically exuding fondness when she speaks. “Marco.”

“You’re lookin’ as ravishing as ever, Annie,” he nods, actually looking a little hopeful. Annie glides over, graceful even on mile-high heels, so tiny that she has to go even further up on tiptoe to plant a kiss on Marco’s cheek.

And then she rears back and backhands him so hard that he staggers into the opposite wall.

“I deserved that,” he groans, getting back to his feet and rubbing at the side of his face, already bright red from the impact.

“You deserve a hell of a lot more than that!” Annie shouts, voice going from deep honey to gravelly sandpaper in a second flat. The heels don’t slow her down a bit as she lunges across the lounge, fisting a hand up in the front of Marco’s shirt and slamming him back against the wall. “After the shit you pulled in Waco?! I oughta put a fuckin’ bullet in your skull! _Where’s my money, you griftin’ son of a bitch?!_ ”

“ _Your_ money’s in an evidence locker at the McLennan County jail,” Marco chokes out, which earns an angry growl from Annie and a hand reared back for another blow. He starts talking faster after that. “Waco was a mistake. I got too ambitious and I didn’t pay the piper and I was in such a hurry to get outta there that I got sloppy. Me and Connie and Bert all got picked up.”

I could swear that her spine physically arches, hands clawed and teeth bared like an angry alley cat going in for the attack. “I _made you_ , you little shit. You were _nothin’_ when I took you in, and _this_ is how you repay me. You got balls of steel comin’ back here, Marco. Maybe I’ll mount ‘em over my mantel when I’m done with you.”

“I said _your_ money was at the jail,” he croaks, lifting the bag in reference. “However, I have enough here to pay you back. Plus interest.”

Annie pauses mid-snarl, snatching the bag out of his hand so quickly that the paper tears. Still watching him like a hawk, she carries it over to the bar and dumps in out, counting out stacks of cash one by one. “There’s three-fifty here.”

Marco nods, wincing as he brushes the wrinkles out of his shirt. “My cut, your cut, and a hundred dollars worth of ‘please don’t mount my manhood above your fireplace.’ Are we square?”

Annie looks at the money, and then at Marco, then me, back to the money again. And she laughs, a loud, raucous sound, leaning back against the bar and fanning herself with one fat stack of bills. “I’ll be damned. Bring out the fatted calf and kill it, Reiner; the Prodigal Son’s returned.”

Reiner sputters for a moment before muttering, “Uh, we ain’t got no fatted calves, Miss Leonhart.”

“Then get a bottle of Scotch, you useless lump!”

He ducks out the door on the other side of the lounge almost alarmingly quickly, reappearing with a bottle of amber liquid that looks both old and expensive and filling three glasses from under the bar.

“So,” Annie hums, ascending elegantly back to her stool and staring at me with those unsettlingly blue eyes over the top of her glass, “Who’s this one, Marco? Flavor of the week?”

It’s the best whiskey I’ve ever had in my life, but the sip I’m taking turns sour in my mouth.

“I was wonderin’ the same thing,” Reiner pipes up from the other side of the lounge, raising an eyebrow in Marco’s direction. “Never would’ve thought that you’d like ‘em skinny.”

I choke on my own spit.

“Nothin’ personal, man,” Marco snickers, reaching up to pat Reiner on the shoulder before he catches the utter look of terror on my face and breaks down into an all-out cackle, walking over and slinging the arm that’s not busy holding up his drink around my waist. “Don’t worry ‘bout it, darlin’. Annie’s what I like to call the den mother of queer Texan criminals. She never meant for it to happen that way, it just sorta did.”

“Least I don’t have to worry about you little shits knockin’ up any of my cocktail waitresses,” says Annie, rolling her eyes and finishing off her drink. “You want something, Marco. I know you didn’t come back here outta genuine contrition. You ain’t got an ounce of that in your body.”

“Jean and I have engaged in a business partnership,” Marco practically beams.

“Bet that ain’t all you’ve engaged in,” Reiner mutters darkly.

“Shut up, Reiner.”

“Yes, Miss Leonhart.”

“We’re headed north, but we need some tools of the trade before we can start work,” he explains, swirling what’s left of the Scotch around in his glass and taking a contemplative sip. “I’m in the market for some iron we can pack before we roll outta Houston.”

Annie gets up from her stool with a sigh, patting her hair back into place. “Well, you can take a look around, but the stockroom’s pretty pathetic right now. My runners keep gettin’ picked up. They don’t make ‘em as talented as you anymore, Marco. You ever consider just picking up where you left off back here with us? With Connie locked up, there’s a vacancy for your boy, too.”

“I would. I really would, but…” Marco acts like it’s a physical pain to say it, swallowing hard before he presses on. “That one over there just sprung me from Eastham a few days ago.”

“Jesus,” Reiner and Annie both breathe in unison.

“I got two prison breaks under my belt, Annie,” he grimaces, draining his glass and running a hand through his hair. “I need to get over the state line, sooner rather than later.”

She nods, ushering us through the back door and actually reaching up to smooth a hand over the place on his cheek where she slapped him earlier. It’s like the mere mention of Eastham has made him something to be pitied, and it’s not so much that I wonder if there’s something I don’t know as it is that I’m sure of it. “Where you headed, sugar?”

“Probably New York. Gonna have to work our way east and up the coast, though. That’s why I came to you first.”

“I’ll get in touch with some of my contacts up that way, see if anyone’s got room for you two,” she nods, leading us back through a maze of winding, opulently decorated hallways. It’s like a house, I think, before I realize that this probably _is_ her house, buried under speakeasies and secrecy. The perfect place for a puppetmaster to sit and pull her strings unnoticed. “Room _and_ acceptance; I’m not sending you boys into some shitstorm where you have to play friends for the rest of your lives. Winds of change are a-blowin’, gentlemen, and you’d be surprised how many of them bosses up in the Big Apple don’t give a damn what you stick your fun parts in so long as you do your job.”

“You’re a gem, Annie,” Marco smiles fondly.

“Yeah, we’ll see if you say that once you see the state the stockroom’s in,” she snorts, stopping in front of a door at the end of the hall and hiking up her skirt.

“Woah!” I choke out, blinking owlishly at Annie’s utterly unimpressed expression. The dress is only pulled up high enough that I can see the red straps of a garter belt, but I’m more focused on the snubnose revolver shoved into her garter, gleaming against her stockinged leg.

“Rumor has it that no man’s ever lived to see higher up that that,” Marco whispers in my ear as she unhooks a key from a small metal ring looped around the garter next to the gun, smoothing her skirt in place and unlocking the door.

Once upon a time, the room probably should have been a library, but now it’s mostly-barren shelves sparsely stocked with an array of different guns, boxes of ammunition stashed further back. Marco lets out a dismayed little groan at the state of affairs, prowls along behind Annie and darts his hand out every once in a while to pick something up. Another revolver, a heftier-looking handgun, and what looks to be a sawed-off shotgun. Arms full of metal, he turns around to Annie with a defeated look. “Nothin’ automatic? BARs? Thompsons?”

“Boy, you don’t need no BARs or Chicago fuckin’ typewriters to rob your way to New York. Stick to Mom and Pop stores and don’t try to bust no banks and you’ll be just fine. You aim too high, that’s always been your problem,” she chides, reaching up and smacking him gently across the back of his head. “Ain’t seen anything automatic in months, anyhow. And I expect payment for what you got there.”

“That hundred extra dollars--”

“Was a gesture of goodwill, and unless you’re willing to let me turn your family jewels into a conversation piece, you’ll let it lie,” says Annie breezily, grabbing several boxes of ammunition before ushering Marco back into the hallway and locking the door behind him. “I want two jobs before you two roll out. I got some tricky business that could use your talents.”

“One job.”

“You don’t bargain with me, Marco Bodt.” Annie’s voice instantly goes dark, a sense of impending danger settling in the hallway. “I don’t have the time or patience to argue with you. I got a business to run and my trumpet player for the club decided not to show up for work tonight, so I gotta handle that shit show--”

“Jean plays the trumpet,” Marco interjects, throwing an arm around my shoulders and fixing her with a winning smile.

Annie’s eyes slide over to rest on me, icy, penetrating. “That so?”

I clutch my trumpet case a little tighter and remind myself to kill Marco later for dragging me into this. “Yes, ma’am.”

“You any good?”

“I’m very good, ma’am.”

She brings a finger up to her carmine-painted lips, mulling it over. “One job, and your boy plays for the club until you leave. Get on up there, Gene.”

“Jean.”

Her eyes narrow. “Did I ask you?”

“No, ma’am.” I’ve never climbed a set of stairs so fast.

The band’s on a five minute break when I emerge back into the club, having drinks and conversing amongst themselves. The canary’s a drop-dead pretty soprano with a golden voice and a magnetic smile, but the charm seems to be solely for paying customers, because I get a glare that could cut diamond the second I move too close with my worn clothes and messy hair. “Uh… I hear y’all need a trumpet player?”

“Hit the bricks, kid,” she snorts, sipping a cosmo and looking down her nose at me. Dad used to hire people like this to play his work parties. The difference a couple years and a secondhand shirt can make.

“Well, see, Miss Leonhart sent me…” I start, and that’s all it takes for them to practically yank me on stage.

“You read sheet music?” The trombone player asks, shoving a music stand at me while I’m still in the corner tuning.

“Yeah, ‘course. Give me the music and a lead sheet and I can fake it ‘til I make it.”

It’s my kind of music, bright, upbeat swing, and I get so lost in playing that I forget being out of practice, relish the sweet ache in my hands after an hour and the gradual tingle of my lips going numb. I mostly end up improvising off the chords on the lead sheets, but it works well enough that the other band members nod approvingly at me and some of the people out on the dance floor even make eye contact and smile. There’s not an exact moment I can pinpoint, but somewhere between the first notes and looking out to see Marco sitting at an empty table with a fresh glass of Scotch and a mile-wide smile, I realize that this is it. This is what I spent all those years looking for, sitting in my room or the garage and wondering what it would be like.

This is getting out.

I spin through a riff and hit a high C like it’s nothing, and someone out on the floor actually cheers.

I go to pick my trumpet back up after the next break, but the canary stops me, grinning and shaking her head. “Don’t worry about it, kid. It’s me and the piano for the rest of the set. Go over and tell Roy to give you a cut of the tips, yeah? Then go find yourself a girl and have a dance or two. You earned it.”

The getting my cut of the tips part is the only instruction I actually follow before the music starts up again and an arm darts out from behind a curtain to pull me into a side room as I pass, Marco’s grin flashing Cheshire Cat white out of the dim, red-tinted darkness. “You were fantastic out there.”

“I was just tryin’ to cover my ass,” I laugh, losing the rest of what I was going to say in the long whiskey-tinted kiss that lingers on my lips even after he pulls away.

The slow lull of the piano music filters in from around the curtain. _“My love must be a blind love; I can’t see anyone but you…”_

“Cut the bullshit. You know you were good,” Marco smiles, and God, I swear I’d do anything to keep him like this, anything to stop him from shrinking back to what I know he’ll become as soon as he lets himself sleep.

A smirk grows at the edges of my still-partly-numb mouth. “Yeah. I was pretty good.”

“Annie said we could kip in her guest room until we head out,” he hums, tracing the edge of my jaw with the tips of his fingers. “No reason we can’t stay up here and have a few drinks before they close, though.”

“Hm.” Instead of making a beeline for the bar, I set my trumpet case down and reach up to rest my arms on his shoulders. “You know how to dance, mister self-purported man of many talents?”

“Hell no,” Marco laughs, clearly a little tipsy given that it doesn’t take too much convincing for him to twine his arms around my waist and sway back and forth to the gentle melody seeping in from the club full of people just on the other side of the curtain.

_“The moon may be high, but I can’t see a thing in the sky, I only have eyes for you…”_

“That’s okay. I’m shit at it too,” I snicker, leaning forward and resting my head on his shoulder. “Hey.”

“Hm?”

“I just…” I can't find a way to articulate it, my lack of skill with words striking again. There’s no way I can tell him how grateful I am for these moments when he comes back to me, how scared I get when I think about the fact that if things had gone differently on Christmas Day, I might still be in Dallas planning my wedding, he might still be in that awful place going through hell on earth. I try for a moment, but eventually give up and settle for, “I love you.”

“Love you too, darlin’,” Marco murmurs into my hair, sounding the closest to happy I think I’ve ever heard him as he spins me around and tries to go for one of those big dramatic Hollywood dips only to drop me on my ass. We sit there and laugh until we can’t breathe, decide as the song ends that dancing doesn’t seem like our thing anyway.

There is no progress in stagnancy, he told me. When bad shit happens, you’ve got to pick yourself up and go.

I will. I will refuse to stagnate in the five months of mistakes I’ll never get back, won’t stew in the pages of unopened letters. I’ll take this. I’ll take him, smiling and laughing and _mine_. I’ll take the fact that he loves me. I’ll take the fact that he’s a smooth-talking convicted felon and a wanted man. I’ll take the darkness behind his eyes that he hasn’t told me about yet, that he may never tell me about. I’ll take the little fights and the long kisses and his hand in mine halfway down a dirt road in the middle of nowhere.

I’ll take him.

And I’ll run.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have a [tumblr.](http://southspinner.tumblr.com)
> 
> [This](http://files.conceptcarz.com/img/Ford/34-Ford-Model-40-V8-DV-09-RMM_01.jpg) is their new ride.
> 
> [This](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qADKhZwwCLI) is the song they were dancing to


	15. Marco

“Y’know, that boy of yours really has something goin’ for him with that trumpet,” Annie muses a few nights after we arrive in Houston, sitting next to me at a linen-draped table and sipping champagne. The club is packed for New Year’s Eve, people pressed together from the bar all the way to the dance floor. Even Annie’s taken the night off from her business ventures downstairs in favor of coming up to sit with me, nothing short of glorious in an iridescent silk evening gown. The idiots giving her the once-over as they pass probably don’t know about the gun strapped to her thigh under all that intricate beading and expensive fabric.

But for all the people here dressed to the nines, my attention’s been fixed on the stage for the past two hours, watching Jean play his set in the new suit that Annie gave him yesterday, griping that he couldn’t play for the big New Year’s bash looking like a hobo. He looks beautiful, but I can’t tell if it’s because of the tailored lines of the jacket accentuating his shoulders and the angular slope of his narrow waist, or if it’s just the way he smiles every time his lips move away from the trumpet’s mouthpiece.

He looks beautiful. He looks happy. I’m starting to notice that the two are essentially the same thing when it comes to him.

The realization should be a good one, but it leaves a bitter taste in my mouth that I try and fail to chase with a glass of champagne snatched off a passing tray. Jean’s happy here, we could have been happy here, but two prison breaks and an arrest warrant with my name on it have held that possibility down and shot it in the face. Repeatedly. Now it’s a waiting game for Annie’s job and a mad break for the state line with a handful of substandard weaponry and prayers for good luck that neither of us have ever seemed to have. The downfall in all of this is that Jean’s not like me. Even back in Dallas, the reason he was so unhappy was that he couldn’t make himself settle. At his core, he’s always been looking for a better place to put down roots. I’ve been stubbornly yanking my own up every time they try to touch the ground for years.

He plays his trumpet and smiles and laughs at some joke the band’s drummer makes, and I can almost see the contentment coming off him in waves. I’m going to have to take him from that. I can’t figure out why I’m so upset about something that’s been part of the plan all along. Maybe it’s because, somewhere along the line, Jean started meaning more than my plans. It’s a dangerous thing to consider - an even more dangerous thing to ignore.

“Yeah. Here’s hoping that he can get something hammered out in New York,” I nod, finishing the champagne out of the flimsy little crystal flute and debating fighting the crowd around the bar to go get something stronger. “After all the shit he’s gone through, kid deserves to have one good thing happen to him.”

“So it’s true, then,” Annie hums, twisting a cigarette into a holder and pausing. There are about six different lighters in front of her face in the space of a second. She smirks and lights up before continuing, the observation leaving her lips on a thin stream of smoke. “You’re goin’ up there on his account.”

“Reckon I can always rob folks no matter what part of the country I’m in. Jean wants to go to New York; I can find something to steal and someone to steal it for up there.”

“And you’d rob your way all the way up the coast for him?”

“I love him,” I shrug, squirming. The words sit just fine on my lips whenever I’m whispering them in the still darkness of Annie’s guest room, humming them against Jean’s lips before he goes up on stage to play a set, but saying them to anyone else feels like the confession of some sort of crime.

Which is ridiculous, of course. No one else but me knows the wrong I’ve done by stealing Jean away from his family and the only home he’s ever known. I don’t even think Jean knows. He smiles and holds my hand under tables on his breaks and talks about how he finally feels like he’s alive, never knowing that he’s decided to take his roots and put them down in salted earth. The knowledge that nothing good can come of him loving me is there, but I keep it to myself so I don’t have to see him lose that happiness. Selfishness is another sin I can tack onto my ledger.

“Never thought I’d live to hear you say that,” Annie snorts, tracing a fingertip around around the rim of her glass. “Figured you were smarter than all that nonsense, Marco.”

I laugh and ask her, “You disappointed?”

“Not really. I think he’s good for you.”

Up on stage, the band finishes their song and starts setting music stands and instruments aside for a ten-minute break. Jean tucks his trumpet carefully back in its case before he looks up and spots me and Annie through the crowd. He breaks into a crooked smile that could light a whole city and waves at me. Something tight constricts around my heart.

“Yeah,” I whisper, deciding that I definitely need to be more drunk to get through the rising tide of conflicting thoughts rushing around in my head. “Yeah, he is.”

But I’m not good for him.

Annie raises an eyebrow, catching the shift in the conversation’s tone, but she doesn’t comment on it, opting for business talk instead. “So, you got the place cased out yet?”

I give her a noncommittal little snort. “For the most part. Still don’t really understand what you want me to do in there.”

“Bust in after everything’s locked up for the night and turn it upside down. Simple enough,” she says, ashing her cigarette into the crystal tray on the table and standing up. “Rough everything up a little, clean out the safe, and get the hell out. You get your guns and a seventy-thirty cut to give you some cash for the road.”

“Hustlin’ folks for protection money. Never would’ve pegged you for something so lowbrow.” Smirking up at her, I lean my chair back on its rear legs and drum my fingers on the tabletop. “Fifty-fifty.”

“Yeah, well, turns out there’s only honor among thieves so long as the economy ain’t gone to shit. Sixty-forty.”

“Slippery slope, Annie. Next thing you know you’ll be runnin’ a ring of pickpockets and petty criminals. You got yourself a deal, though.”

“I’d tell you to go fuck yourself, but it looks like you got a better option walkin’ across the dance floor right now,” says Annie, rolling her eyes and drifting off towards the front door. “I gotta go make sure Reiner’s not letting anyone else in. We’re at capacity. Have your fun, Marco, but I want that job done before the third.”

She’s already gone by the time I look over towards the crowd of dancing couples to see what she meant and spot Jean edging his way across the floor. He stops just short of the table to grab himself a glass of champagne from one of the cocktail waitresses floating around. He thanks her with a crooked grin and a wink, and I swear to God the girl almost fucking faints.

The true crime in all of this is that Jean doesn’t realize the sway he can hold over people. If he were self-aware, he’d be unstoppable.

“Place is a real clam bake tonight, huh?” he says when he makes it over to the table, collapsing into Annie’s abandoned chair with an exhausted sigh.

This is his element. Somewhere like this, with a steady stream of people to adore him and kindle that light under his skin, somewhere he can shine as bright as he was always meant to. That’s where Jean belongs. As for me, I’m still trying to figure out my place in a world where he’s become a constant fixture. The natural thing to think would be that I should be beside him, but there’s something about the prospect of settling that refuses to sit easy under my skin.

When we were kids, the twins would set up wire snares out in the pastures just to see what they could catch. Innumerable half-starved jackrabbits later, some weird net-contraption that Maddox dreamed up caught a terrified lark, flailing as it tried in vain to get off the ground. We put it in a cage and gave it to Ma for her birthday. She’d always loved songbirds. The damn thing never made a peep, though, just beat its wings uselessly against the bars for days on end and refused to eat and eventually flopped over dead. The whole event didn’t really resonate with me until years later.

I’ve never done well with cages.

But there’s something in me now that wants to change, a nightingale heart that’s content to perch inside my ribcage and sing as long as it means Jean gets to keep that smile, to forget the open blue sky and accept something less than what it was meant for. I love Jean, but I hate that songbird in my chest. I want to reach down and break its neck before it drives me to clip my own wings for his sake.

Jean frowns, reaching over to lay a hand on my shoulder. “Hey, are you all right?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine.” Just trying to make sense of an existence where nothing is the way it was before. Just trying to remember some scrap of who I was so I can slap it on like a mask over who I’ve become. It’s hard to feel like I’ve really gone anywhere when the only progress I’ve made is learning to bite the screams back so I don’t wake Jean up when I claw my way out of nightmares.

I’ve never been a songbird. Even in the face of everything that’s changed, I’m still that captive lark beating my wings against the walls around me, refusing to thrive in captivity. We need to get the hell out of Houston while I can still breathe.

The tablecloth is long enough that it’s easy for Jean to reach over and grab my hand without anyone seeing, long fingers tangling up with mine and giving a little squeeze. There’s a little spark of concern in his eyes, but that’s a near constant fixture nowadays. The fact that he looks at me like I’m constantly a breath away from falling apart is just one more thing that keeps me on the edge, but I can’t blame him for it, can’t blame him for loving me like I can blame myself for loving him. Instead, I force a smile and squeeze his hand back, finding an anchor in the spaces between his fingers. I used to be so good at living in the moment.

“What’d Annie want?” he asks, watching the front door as she slips back in from talking to Reiner and starts making her rounds, chatting up certain patrons with a cool gaze behind her smile and a hand always drifting close to her thigh. Business as usual.

“Just checking up on the job,” I shrug, flagging down the nearest waitress and ordering us both something stronger than champagne. I’ve been drinking the shit like water all night and my fingertips don’t even tingle. “Wanted to make sure I know what I’m doing.”

“And what _are_ you doing?”

I flash him a grin, and this one feels a little more genuine. “Wanna come with me tomorrow night and find out?”

He blinks. “You mean, come do the job with you?”

“That’s been the plan all along, ain’t it?”

“I mean, I guess, but…” Jean trails off, looking at the couples spinning around on the dance floor, the gleam of the instruments resting in their stands onstage. Longing. “But I gotta play my set tomorrow, so I don’t know if--”

“We can’t stay here forever, Jean.” Ripping his new roots up myself makes me feel ill, but someone’s got to do it. “You can’t get comfortable, darlin’, not when we’re gonna be hell and gone over the state line by the time the week’s out.”

“I know that,” he says, looking wounded. I wonder how flexible I’d have to be to actually kick myself. “It’s just that this has been nice, y’know. This is what I’ve always wanted to do.”

“Nah, you got bigger dreams than this dump,” I tell him, brushing my thumb across his knuckles and taking the glass of whiskey that the waitress brings over with a hasty thank-you. “New York, remember? Big bands, big names, big paychecks?”

“New York’s a long way away.”

“The farther away from Texas the better, far as I’m concerned.”

Jean sighs and pulls his hand away from mine, wrapping it around his own drink and taking a gulp of Scotch that probably would have knocked him flat on his ass six months ago. Even if I’ve stolen his innocence, I’ve at least given him a higher alcohol tolerance. “Yeah, you’re right. I’m being stupid.”

“Hey.” The resignation in his eyes when he looks at me feels like getting hit with a truck at sixty miles an hour. That was the look I fought so hard to take away from him in Dallas. I threw my own best interests out the window in the name of taking that weariness away from him, and now I’m the one responsible for it. Consequences and wandering eyes be damned, I reach over and press a hand to his cheek, a single, fleeting moment, fingertips tracing the angle of his jawline when I pull away. “Don’t ever call yourself stupid again. I know stupid. I’ve spent most of my goddamn life dealin’ with stupid, and it ain’t you by a long shot. What you are is _scared_ , Jean, and that’s okay. I ain’t exactly mellow about this whole shitshow either.”

“Running across the country, breaking laws, my face on wanted posters…” Laughing a little shakily, he takes another drink and runs a hand through his hair, blond cowlicks sticking up every which way in his wake. “Yeah. Guess I’m kinda nervous.”

“Bah, you’re overreactin'.” Jean shoots me a glare that could cut diamond, not softening until long after I smirk over at him and finish the statement out with, “Your face won’t be on wanted posters ‘til you’ve at _least_ committed a handful of armed robberies. That’s a bragging right you gotta work your way up to, kid.”

“You probably got your first one framed, didn’t you?”

“Nah. That’d just be narcissistic. Besides, they used a shitty picture. My nose looked terrible.”

Jean snorts into his glass. “You’re somethin’ else.”

“You got that right, sugar,” says Annie, materializing out of the crowd behind him and sliding into a vacant chair at our table. The champagne must be hitting her. She only smiles when she’s drunk or homicidal. “Been sayin’ that from the moment I met him. Cheeky little bastard from day one.”

“Annie, can we not?” I groan.

But she’s already off, and the price for stopping her is probably another orifice in my body that I don’t want or need courtesy of a bullet. Annie just hums out a little laugh, fixing herself another cigarette and waiting for Jean to light it for her before she continues. “Oh, you should’ve seen him, Jean, skinny as a rail and beat up all to hell, thinkin’ he was ten feet tall and bulletproof. How old were you, Squirt, seventeen?”

“Sixteen.” I’m definitely not drunk enough for this.

“Sixteen years old, comes ridin’ a cargo train into Houston, covered in dirt, ain’t had a decent meal in weeks, and tries to pickpocket Reiner out in some alley somewhere. _Reiner_ , of all people,” Annie snickers, draining her glass of champagne and shaking her head.

“She’s neglecting to mention that I _succeeded_ in pickpocketing Reiner and would’ve made a clean getaway if I hadn’t knocked over a trash can tryin’ to jump a fence,” I grouse, looking over at Jean, who’s at least had the good grace to not laugh yet. Even though he can’t possibly know why, I still feel like he’s giving me a sort of solidarity.

Annie thinks it’s a funny story. I know better. Even four years later she doesn’t know the truth, because a part of me was always afraid that telling the truth would eventually result in five-foot-nothing of concentrated blonde rage kicking in a farmhouse door in Telico with a sawed-off shotgun in hand - Annie protects her own. That was the first lesson I’d learned, courtesy of a bloody nose that was my penance for snatching Reiner’s wallet. She protects her own, and my desire to leave that life behind me and let it settle with the dust I’d kicked up as I left would have been at odds with Annie’s proclivity for revenge.

(The second lesson I learned was that Annie only protects her own until they double-cross her, courtesy of watching her put two bullets in a man’s kneecaps for skimming off the shipments of bootleg alcohol he was supposed to be running for her. There was a reason I’d intended to never set foot in Houston again after what I did in Waco. I’m fond of my extremities.)

So she doesn’t know. She might have guessed at a few things, of course; not too hard to figure out that a half-starved kid with black-and-blue skin and a back that looks like something the butcher shop threw out didn’t come from the happiest of circumstances. But guessing and _knowing_ are two different things, especially where Annie’s concerned. I let her keep that ignorance for my own reasons, and now I’m even more glad that I made that call all those years ago. The idea of Jean hearing about fists flying and the cruel snap of leather and _Our son is dead_ as a result of Annie’s tipsy nostalgia is something I don’t even want to entertain.

“So out of the goodness of my heart, I offer the little shit a job, and wouldn’t you know it, he’s _made for it._ Best runner I’ve ever had. Not a single shipment lost, not a single penny unaccounted for. Until, of course, he got greedy and _hauled ass outta Waco with my money._ ”

“I paid you back,” I grumble, defensive.

“Under duress,” Jean chimes in not-so-helpfully.

“Your boy don’t miss much, does he?” Annie muses, rolling her cigarette holder back and forth between her fingers. “And you wouldn’t’ve showed your freckly mug in this town again if you didn’t need me to help you get out of state, Marco; don’t bullshit me. You got greedy in Waco, you ran off with my cut and got Connie and Bertholdt both arrested, and you still ain’t sorry.”

Well, she’s got me there. “They made their own choice to go with me. My hands are clean.”

“Is that what you really think?” she laughs. “Or is that just what you say so you don’t have to see yourself as some sorta fucked-up, gun-totin’ Peter Pan, haulin’ kids off to your lawless Neverland?”

“You get too philosophical when you drink, Annie,” I snap.

“Cheshire Cat,” Jean mumbles.

“What?” Annie and I both ask in stereo.

He looks very pointedly into his drink, spinning the glass around on the tabletop to keep his hands busy. “If we’re gonna assign people to literary figures, Marco’s more of a Cheshire Cat than Peter Pan. Wendy wanted to leave and found out that the home she left was better than she thought. Alice wanted to go home and ended up discovering that she could have more adventures in Wonderland than in the world she came from. Peter Pan’ll sweet talk you until you think the grass is greener even when it ain’t. Cheshire Cat’s the one who just points you down the road and lets you figure out things for yourself.”

“Well, look at you,” Annie smirks.

Jean’s face reddens. “I read a lot of books when I was a kid.”

“Huh,” says Annie, turning her gaze to me and tilting her head to the side. “Y’know, I can see it.”

“See what?” I ask.

“The whole Cheshire Cat bit,” she replies, standing up and heading back into the sea of people. “You got the smile for it. You boys have fun now.”

I don’t bother watching her go, finishing off my drink in one searing gulp and drifting off in the babble of hundreds of voices and clinking glasses. Maybe it’s the lack of sleep, or maybe it’s my old restlessness rearing its head again, but everything feels too close, too loud, the walls and people pressing in until I can’t breathe or think or--

“Marco?” The worry is carved into Jean’s face in invisible furrows, aging him years in the span of seconds as he slips his hand back under the tablecloth to rest on my knee. “You know that it’s all gonna be okay, right?”

Darling, I don’t even remember how “okay” feels.

“Yeah. Yeah, ‘course,” I nod, trying to roll the feeling of being smothered off my shoulders. “D’you have to go back for your next set soon?”

He shakes his head. “Nah. It’s Petra and the piano from now ‘til the party’s over. I just figured I’d sit around and soak up the free booze for a while.”

“I think I’m gonna turn in.” There’s a distant roar starting in the back of my head, the alcohol hitting home at the wrong time. As much as I’ve told myself that I’ve moved past those moments of weakness that left me paralyzed, curled into Jean’s chest and shaking apart at the seams in the dead of night, I can only be so much of an expert liar when it comes to trying to fool myself.

Time stutters, and I’m somehow on my feet, swaying through some misguided attempt to get back to the stairs down to Annie’s apartment. Apparently, champagne doesn’t hit me until I stand up. Jean catches up to me halfway across the club, careful hands steadying me as I stagger sideways. I mutter something and try to push him off, some fragmented lamentation about how no one that tries to keep me upright ever comes out the better for it. He shakes his head, stubborn, beautiful, guides me through the pressing crowds and down to the bottom of the stairwell.

“Hey. Hey, look at me,” Jean whispers, fingertips brushing along my jaw, tilting my head until our eyes meet. I try to remember that first day be the side of the road, dust and dry heat, his eyes, tawny and flashing golden in the sunlight. Months ago. We were different people then. Has it really been such a short time since I was the one holding him up, guiding him through the fears holding him to Dallas like rusted shackles? It seems impossible now, hiding in a staircase, drunk off my ass and leaning on Jean to keep myself upright in more ways than one.

“Look at me,” he says again. “I love you.”

“You love who I was,” I slur, too drunk for my better judgment to stop the words before they’re stumbling over my clumsy tongue and whiskey-lacquered lips. I can’t find the words to tell him that who I am is even less worthy of love than I was before, can’t figure out the best way to describe that the only thing you get for trying to hold shattered pieces close to you is blood and pain.

Jean’s expression knits up into something so sad that I feel an echo of the ache he’s carrying around somewhere in my own hollow core, his arms dropping to twine around my waist and pull me close. There’s some kind of irony in the way I always imagined myself holding him only to end up on the opposite end of the equation, but I’m too far gone to spot it, seeking absolution I know I’ll never find in the warmth beneath his skin.

His lips skate lightly along the hinge of my jaw, whispering love I don’t deserve. “I love _you_. That’s it. No modifiers, no fine print, no nothin’, Marco. I love _you_.”

“You shouldn’t.”

“You’re right,” he says, nodding as he pulls away. “But I’ve spent eighteen years doing what I should do. Figure I’ve earned the right to say ‘fuck it’ just this once.”

 _“ Ten, nine, eight!"_  Voices rise in unison from upstairs, like a coming hurricane, a tidal wave. I've never even seen the ocean.

"Your sister was right, y'know," I mutter, tracing the curve of his shoulders and the seams of his suit with reverent hands, the closest to worshipful that my sinful soul is ever likely to get. "I stole you. Cased the joint and grabbed the goods and ran. Just like holdin' up a store."

_"Seven, six, five, four!"_

"That ain't true; I'm the one who busted you out--"

"No, no, I stole you. Meant to do it, too. Robbin' folks is the only profession I got, see." Shaking my head only makes the alcohol rush worse, a broken little laugh rattling in my throat as I all but collapse against the wall, tugging Jean with me.

"Marco," he says. Never was too religious, but if I had to pick a sound for angel choirs, there it is.

_"Three, two..."_

"You were the prettiest thing I ever stole, though, Jean. The prettiest thing."

_"One! Happy New Year!"_

His hand settles warm across the nape of my neck, pulling me down into a long kiss that drowns out the cheers and the distant sound of Petra singing "Auld Lang Syne" upstairs. He tastes like champagne and second chances, and if I were a good person I'd shove him away so this would never come to the inevitable end of me dragging him down. But I've never been a good person, and I accepted long ago that loving Jean has made a wreck of me. Maybe he's done the same.

I pull him closer and try to find the breath of life I know is hidden somewhere behind his lips. The heart I stole beats loudly beneath my seeking palms, and I can only hate myself for it until I feel the crooked curve of his smile against my mouth.

"Think I'm gonna make a New Year's resolution," Jean hums after he pulls back, taking a fleeting glance upstairs and then turning back to me with the smile I never wanted to fall in love with. "I ain't gonna be scared anymore. Spent too much time doing it as-is."

"World's a scary goddamn place, darlin'." If I'm not a walking example of what fear can do to a person, I don't know what is.

“Not as much anymore with you around. Come on, sweetheart. A little resolution can’t hurt.”

I envy him for that. I envy him for seeing something in me that I can no longer see in myself, for being able to look past my broken parts and see me as something he can cling to. I envy him for being able to believe a lie so firmly that he places his heart in its hands and trusts without reservation. That sort of faith has always been foreign to me. I’ve never believed in destiny or karma or a loving god, never trusted something I couldn’t do with my own two hands.

But Jean. Jean believes in dreams and fairytales and all the possibilities of the great wide world, carries a candle flame in the center of his chest that he’s sheltered from the dusty winds for years uncounted. It’s flickered and dimmed but still remained against all odds, and I don’t believe in walking on water or raising the dead because I’ve never seen them, but Jean is a miracle in and of himself, and if I’m to have a faith, let it be him.

I don’t believe in much. But I believe in Jean. Maybe, just maybe, that will be enough.

I won’t make a resolution, because no one ever keeps those. It’s something more along the lines of a vow, a solemn oath sweared to the one person I’ll ever care enough to answer to as I pull him close and will the alcohol off my heavy tongue long enough to promise, “I’m gonna be better.”

It’s a start. It’s not much, but it’s better than nothing. It’s better than I’ve been before when he half-carries me through the winding halls of Annie’s place and drops me on the guest bed, and I don’t fear the nightmares to the point that I’m in half a panic before I even fall asleep. It’s better than I’ve been before when Jean tentatively curls up behind me, solid and warm with his heartbeat humming gently against my spine and fingers tracing the rise and fall of the old scars across my shoulders, and I don’t feel like crawling out of my own skin. For the first night since Eastham, I sleep, I really _sleep_ , deep and dark and dreamless. It’s better. I’m going to be better.

It’s a start.

* * *

Jean manages to talk his way out of playing his set late that afternoon, and even though Petra and the rest of the band give us both the stink eye on the way out of the club, I can’t bring myself to regret uprooting him anymore. Apologies are hard enough, and it’s hard to feel sorry for his excited smile when he piles into the V8 beside me and holds my hand through the narrow streets and the shifting hues of the setting sun. “So. My first job. We should make a scrapbook page.”

“This ain’t even a job,” I snort, navigating Houston on muscle memory, too focused in the way the blazing, dying light of day catches his hair and makes the longer, usually ashy strands shine like spun gold. I am a brainless, lovelorn fool, but I’m a fool who’s finally remembered how to live, so I can’t even find it in myself to be embarrassed for it. “It’s housekeeping. Annie’s trying to get her hooks in me and keep me down here. Sentimental bullshit. She’s desperate.”

Jean’s quiet for a long moment, tracing the chapped rise and fall of my knuckles with careful fingertips. “If we didn’t have to get out of state, would you do it?”

“Do what, stay? Maybe. No use thinkin’ about it when it ain’t an option.”

“I just thought… You and Annie worked together for four years. You must have been happy,” he says. That’s not what he’s saying. There’s something layered beneath the words, and I can’t look away from the traffic long enough to figure out what it is.

“I wouldn’t call it _happy_ ,” I start, frowning. “More like… okay. I was okay. And I’d spent so much of my life before being _not_ okay that I needed four years of okay to catch up. And then, you’ll note, I stole Annie’s money and took off seeking my great perhaps.”

“Oh.” Jean looks a little confused, mulling carefully over the next words he chooses. “Four years just seems a long time for someone like you to settle down. I figured you stayed because you found something to stay for. Or someone. Y’know.”

I laugh so hard that I almost year-end the car in front of us. “You thought I had some sort of passionate love story hangin’ around in Houston? Aw, _shit_ , darlin’, that’s rich. I mean, Reiner and I used to have a thing, but--”

_“What?!”_

“--but it was _casual_ , Jean; don’t get your panties in a twist,” I finish, biting back the laughter because Jean’s expression is growing darker by the second and laughing at him probably isn’t the best way to defuse the situation. “No strings, and sure as hell no sappy love story. Just good, clean fun… well. Fun, at any rate. It ended on good enough terms after Bert started workin’ for Annie, and to tell you the truth, Reiner’s probably still so pissed at me for landing his boy in the big house that he’d put a bullet in me if he thought Annie’d let him. You got nothin’ to worry about.”

Jean doesn’t say anything. He’s silent for the next few minutes, looking straight out the windshield, and I have forgotten so much about him. I’ve forgotten that he doesn’t come from a world where _casual_ is something you can say about fucking someone, that someone who carries so much love around inside of them could probably never understand what it’s like to be okay with waking up to an empty side of the bed and keeping things and people far away so you don’t get tangled in them. I’ve forgotten that he’s still scared even though he’s made a resolution not to be, that the old fear from the summer in Dallas is still curled in the center of him like a rattlesnake rearing back for the strike. It’s old fear, deep fear, just with new motivations behind it. If I’d thrown everything away to be with him, I’d be scared of him leaving too.

Oh, wait.

I park the car outside a stretch of storefronts along a busy street, killing the engine and turning around to reach over and lay a hand on his knee. He turns his head pointedly away. “Hey. Look at me.”

“Am I casual too, Marco?” he asks, the softness of the question not enough to cover the sharp steel beneath it.

“No, and that’s why I want you to _look at me_ when I say this, you goon.” There’s no one on the sidewalk this close to closing time, and the cars are going by too fast outside to see me close a gentle grip around his jaw and tilt his head until he’s staring at me with accusing eyes that only soften when they see that I’m done joking around, hand brushing down the side of his neck and settling on his shoulder. “I love you. I don't want anyone else. So I’ll say it again. You have _nothin’_ to worry about.”

I expect for him to still be sad. I expect for him to look at me and call me a liar, because that’s what I’ve been for my entire life and sometimes the truth feels so far-fetched that I wonder if the meaning of the word itself has inverted. I don’t expect for him to shrug, twine his fingers up with mine and kiss the back of my hand with a murmured “Okay.”

But he does.

“Okay?” I ask.

“Okay,” he shrugs again, letting my hand drop and giving me a little smile that makes all of me ache in the best way. “You got no reason to lie. I don’t get why you’re so surprised by the fact that I trust you.”

“Do you, though?” I hate how soft I sound, how soft he actually makes me. I can hear birdsong somewhere in the core of me, that hateful little part of me that’s happy in a cage as long as Jean is there chirping away. I no longer have the will to silence it. “Do you really trust me, after all of this?”

“I love you,” he says, like it’s the simplest thing in the world, the sky being blue, the sun rising in the East. “Trust kinda comes in a package deal with that.”

I think about last night, about me sleeping with my back to the wall for the past six months and finally making the decision to fall asleep with Jean’s breath ghosting across the nape of my neck.

Yeah. I guess it does.

Jean peers out through the windshield at the strip of storefronts, frowning in confusion. “What’s so sentimental about Annie sendin’ you here?”

“This place was where I did my very first job,” I tell him, pointing out the window at the front door of what’s now a general store. “Right over there used to be a florist. The old owner was one of the first stops on Annie’s rum-running route. Had a distillery in the basement of the shop. She’d buy the hooch wholesale from him, I’d pick up shipments there in that back alley and run them out across town to smaller buyers. Jack the price up, keep service consistent, and it’s instant profit. Annie built her whole empire on bootleggin’. Not surprised that she’s scrabbling for a grip now that Prohibition’s over.”

“So why are we here now? It’s obviously under new management.”

“Guess you’ll have to wait and see, won’t you?”

And wait and see we do. The traffic thins out, the sun sinks into darkness, and eventually the light in the general store clicks off. The owner, a twitchy, rodent-looking guy in his forties, steps out the front door and locks the place up, looking over his shoulder the whole way to his car. He knows what’s coming. Good thing for him that Annie’s in the mood for gentle reminders rather than more severe action. Jean’s dozed off sometime during the stakeout, and I prod him awake with an impatient dig to the ribs. “Guns in the backseat. Take your pick.”

That wakes him up, eyes going wide and a little hiccup of fear in his voice. “Why do we need guns?”

“In case the _law_ shows up, Jean, Christ.” I stick to the Colt that Jean used to bust me out of Eastham, familiar with the weight and the sights, checking the safety before slipping it into my waistband and hopping out of the car. “We won’t need ‘em, but you never go into a job unarmed. You got a lot to learn.”

Jean is far less cavalier about picking up one of the handguns I bought from Annie with the pawnshop money, holding it between two fingers like he’s afraid it might go off. My lessons must have stuck, though, because after a beat he checks the safety, lines up his sights the way he learned, and sticks the thing down the back of his pants with a stubborn set to his jaw. He only flinches a little. I’m proud of him.

Until he walks right up the the front door of the shop and starts tugging at the handle. Then I stop being proud and start being exasperated.

“Jean.”

“So are we gonna pick the lock? Do we just bust the glass?”

“Jean, no.”

“I bet if I got a real good runnin’ start I could--”

“Jean. I appreciate your enthusiasm, but we won’t be using the front door.” Making a concerted effort to not bury my face in my hands, I point towards the alley next to the store. “Front door’ll be where the alarm is, if they have one. We’re using a different entrance.”

“Oh.” His face falls a little bit. I don’t have time to be thinking about how adorable it is.

“The mobster movie stuff comes later, kid,” I grin, looping a hand loosely around his wrist and tugging him down the alley. There’s a dumpster in front of the spot in the wall I’m looking for, but with a good amount of pushing and cursing between Jean and myself, we manage to scoot the thing over to reveal a half-rotted cellar door held shut by a rusty padlock. “Call it a service door. Leads down to the basement. I used to use this stairway to load my shipments.”

“So _now_ do we pick the lock?”

“I can’t pick locks for shit. Connie was the one that was good at it. So, in the absence of the master, we’re gonna do this instead,” I tell him, pointing the Colt down at the lock and firing off a round.

Jean about jumps out of his skin, staggering backwards with his hands clapped over his ears. “God Almighty, someone’s bound to have heard that!”

“A car backfired,” I shrug, kicking the demolished lock to the side and hauling the cellar door open, giving way to a rush of cool, musty air. “Now get down there before someone comes to investigate.”

Jean cringes and complains about cobwebs in his face the whole way down the stairs in pitch darkness - fucking rich kids, man; I’ll stop saying it when it stops being true - but makes it to the bottom well enough, which is more than I can say for myself when I end up tripping two stairs from the bottom and crashing into Jean, landing on top of him on the dusty basement floor.

“Very smooth, Marco, and I’m flattered, but we got work to do,” he drawls, and I can hear the smirk in his voice. Little shit.

“Trust me, when I’m tryin’ to be smooth, you’ll know.” Deciding that two can play at this unintentional game, I feel around until I find his hair beneath my fingers, tighten them into a fist and yank back _hard_. Jean’s snickering turns into a gasp, and I file that information away for later use, leaning down and pressing a kiss to the humid patch of skin behind his ear. “And when I do, all the lights will be on so I can watch that grin get wiped off your pretty face.”

“Eyes on the prize,” he rasps out, and I figure that I probably shouldn’t be too mean on the kid’s first job, standing up and dusting myself off before feeling around to help Jean to his feet as well.

I spent years getting around this cellar in the dark, so doing it one more time isn’t exceptionally hard. The new owner’s moved some things around, but it’s still twenty steps  forward and slightly to the right from one staircase to another, still eleven creaky steps up to a rickety wooden door. And the door’s still unlocked. The shop is lit dimly by the streetlights outside, casting shadows on the shelves of goods and racks of clothes standing silent watch over our intrusion. Jean emerges from the basement with dirt all over him and a faint blush still clinging to his cheekbones, but I can’t laugh at him given that I probably don’t look much better.

“So are you gonna tell me what we’re doing now?” he whispers, trying to dust off his shirt and nearly backing into a display of chocolate bars.

“Now that Annie’s out of the rum runnin’ business, she’s taken on other endeavors,” I explain, looking around the store and trying to figure out where the line of visibility from the street would be. “The new owners of this place owe her protection money and ain’t payed up in a couple of months.”

“Protection money?” Jean tilts his head to the side, blinking slowly. “What do they need protection from?”

“From this,” I say as I knock a lamp off the counter with a musical tinkle of breaking porcelain.

It’s lowbrow and petty and I actually feel a little bad for doing it. Stealing money with a gun in someone’s face is honest work, compared to most other criminal endeavors. There’s a measure of hard labor and dedication that comes with having the balls to rob folks at gunpoint, a sort of understanding that yeah, I’m taking your hard-earned cash, but I’m risking a bullet in my ass to get it and running damn hard to get away from that fate, so in a way I’m just putting in my nine-to-five like everyone else. Skulking around in a place I broke into after dark is just, well… sleazy. No famous cat burglars in the history books. But beggars can’t be choosers, and Annie has to make a living somehow, and it’s out of whatever loyalty that still binds me to her that I casually move around the shop and wreak havoc, breaking china and knocking over displays and pocketing whatever looks nice. Jean just stands there with his jaw on the floor, looking like he doesn’t know what to do.

“You can always shop around, darlin’,” I call from where I’ve busied myself emptying out containers of coffee grounds onto the floor. “Or look under that front counter and see if you can find a lockbox. That’s where they’ll be keepin’ the cash since the banks are closed for New Year’s Day.”

He just meanders a few steps forward, looking at the display of candy that I’d almost tripped over like it’s somehow prolific. “When I was seven, Eren and I got caught tryin’ to shoplift candy bars from the five and dime. Only time I’ve ever stolen anything. Dad about whipped my hide off.”

“I guarantee you, he didn’t even come close to it,” I deadpan, shoulders tingling.

Jean’s not listening though, picking up a single chocolate bar from the display and turning it over thoughtfully between his hands for a few moments. Then, nodding as though he’s made some sort of decision, he peels the wrapper back and takes a chomp out of it, smiling at me with chocolatey teeth. “There. ‘M an outlaw now.”

My jaw slackens in disbelief. “You steal an already-stolen car, bust a felon outta jail, and break into a store, and eatin’ a goddamn chocolate bar is what makes you an outlaw.”

“What?” he protests, and it’s a little hard to take him seriously with his mouth full and his cheeks puffed out like a chipmunk’s.

“Nothin’,” I laugh, shaking my head and going back to my calculated destruction. “You’re just very… pure.”

“You wouldn’t be sayin’ that if you could’ve heard what I was thinking down in the basement.”

“Not like that. I mean you’re pure in the way that you see things, I guess.” How long ago was it that I would have gotten a thrill out of eating a stolen candy bar. How long has it been since my pleasures were that simple? It sounds like something that Michael and Connie and I might have gotten into as kids, hell, probably _was_ something we got into, and I’ve just forgotten it under the weight of bigger schemes and grander plans.

Jean doesn’t want to make the papers and the history books to prove his own existence. He just wants to stand there and revel in his stolen chocolate, and there’s something so simple and ironically _good_ inherent in that.

“I just hope it lasts,” I whisper. He doesn’t hear me, already cackling at the idea of making off with a king’s ransom in sweets.

With the shop sufficiently wrecked, I pick up the errand I assigned Jean and jump over the counter to look for a lockbox, which I find next to the register. There’s cash rattling inside when I shake it, and it’s locked, but that’s not an issue. Annie probably keeps the necessary tools to open things like this in her manicure kit or something. I stash the thing under my arm and wander back into the aisles, running into Jean as he’s midway through trying to figure out how to stuff his shirt with wrapped butterscotch candies for maximum carrying capacity.

“If you’re gonna take anything, you should look for things we need,” I point out, sort of hating to ruin his fun. “Clothes, toiletries, a good pocket knife if they got one somewhere. You can’t live on butterscotch.”

“Watch me,” Jean grumbles, mutinous, but he puts an armload of the candy back anyway.

He goes to hunt down soap, and I end up browsing the meager selection of clothes, tossing what doesn’t interest me to the floor and coming up with a few new shirts and a nice black vest before I turn around and see it sitting almost innocuously on a table. “Well, I’ll be goddamned.”

“Huh?” Jean’s head pops out from an aisle, a new pair of pants looped around his neck like a scarf.

I pull the gray newsboy cap on and tilt it purposefully off center, grinning at him. “I like this hat. I’m taking this hat.”

Ninette has the one I gave her as collateral back in Dallas, but this almost feels symbolic, shedding one ratty, worn out thing only to put on another just like it, only fresher, newer. Better. I’m going to be better. Jean rolls his eyes and mutters something about _you and your fuckin’ hats_ before he goes back to rooting around for a pair of suspenders that will fit him. I wander back through the wrecked toiletries section, grabbing a toothbrush and  new comb for myself, fingers grazing over the items left on the shelf until they still over a little round tin of Vaseline. An eyebrow quirks up before I can reign the expression in. Subconsciously following my train of thought, I glance over at Jean, who’s shedding the dusty shirt that got wrecked in the basement to put on a new one, his body all wiry lines and bony ridges and intimate little details I should not be thinking about kissing in the middle of trying to vandalize a store. He looks up, catches me staring, and _winks_ , the little fucker. I go ahead and slip the travel-sized tin of petroleum jelly in my pocket, something telling me that if I don’t get it now, I’ll kick myself for it later.

We end up leaving the place a complete mess, the lockbox and a good bit of merchandise in hand. Jean’s fingers fret noisily at the wrapper of another stolen candy bar on the way back to Annie’s, and he doesn’t talk for a few minutes, eventually looking over at me as the passing streetlights strobe across his face. “Is it bad that I thought that was kinda fun?”

“You’re askin’ the wrong person for moral direction, baby.”

“Yeah, but…”

“Look, Jean,” I sigh, turning a sharp corner and taking the short way back to the club. “Life’s a lot easier if you take other people’s shoulds and should-nots outta the picture. Does it make you feel good? Do it. Does it make you feel shitty? Don’t do it. End of the day, when you’re trying to sleep at night, you gotta answer to yourself. I sleep just fine, and I’ve been pissin’ on the law since I was old enough to aim at it.”

Not exactly true. As of late, I don’t sleep very well at all. But if I’m to be Jean’s compass in this, then the sin of lying about my own comfort for the sake of his is something I can live with.

Jean nods, pensive, and pops a piece of chocolate into his mouth, letting it melt on his tongue with a satisfied little smile. “Tastes better like this.”

“Right? Forbidden fruit. Or sugar, I guess,” I agree, grin turning wicked as I drop a had from the gearshift down to squeeze his knee. “You should try fuckin’ in a car you stole and then come and talk to me about things being sweeter.”

Jean chokes on his chocolate. I’m mean for laughing at him. Oh well.

I was right about Annie keeping lockpicks in her manicure kit. She’s got the lockbox popped open in five minutes flat, doling out the cash between us. Fifty-fifty, even though we’d agreed to me having a smaller cut.

“Buy yourself a decent suit, you bum,” she grouses, tucking an extra wad of bills into my breast pocket and looking up at me with a weary sort of concern. “You’re sure you’re not gonna stay.”

“I can’t, Annie.” Part of me wishes I could, but I shove that songbird back in its cage before it gets too loud.

She answers with a solemn nod, shutting the lockbox gently. “I got boys on the inside of the police here in Houston, but I can get some rumors spread that you two made a run for the border, throw ‘em off your trail. You got plates you can switch on that car?”

“Five or six. Not my first rodeo; I know how to stay low.”

“Switch ‘em before you leave. The furthest my name’ll protect y’all is a few miles south of Waco. From there to the state line, you’re on your own.” Annie looks more scared than she should, and it makes me wonder if she knows something I don’t. But before I have time to ask, she’s turning over to Jean, fixing his collar and giving him a look of terse approval. “I’ll be seein’ you in someone’s band on a record cover before the year’s out. Get a better haircut before that day comes. You keep a tight leash on this one, y’hear? And give it a good hard pull if he starts getting high-strung.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Jean laughs, kissing the back of Annie’s hand like the little gentleman he was raised to be and picking up his trumpet case from the chaise in the lounge. “I appreciate the chance to play while I was here.”

“You got bigger places to go than my little dive, kid. I just hope you make it there in one piece.” Frowning, Annie turns back to me. Even in her signature towering heels she’s still so tiny, has to reach so far to cradle my face between pale palms. “You drive fast, Marco, you hear me? You burn rubber ‘til you’re miles over that state line.”

“There’s a reason I stole a V8.” My smile’s shaky, the attempt to bring levity to the situation falling short.

“I mean it, Squirt, don’t you sass me.” There’s too much wobble in her voice for the usual vitriol to come through, icy eyes distant like she can see something out beyond her windowless walls. “Did I ever tell you that my grandma always said I had a second sight?”

“Got some ghosts down here?”

“Not like that. But it makes sense. I made my way in the world that way, you know. Knowing the way the wind’s blowing,” she mutters, taking a step back and curling in on herself a little. “Every single time a storm blew through that godforsaken farm, I knew for hours before it hit. Even before the cows and the horses started actin’ up, I knew.”

“Annie…” I start, uneasy at seeing her knocked so off balance, but her normal force returns in the delicate hand that closes like a vise around my forearm, eyes burning up at me through the lounge’s dim lighting.

“There’s a storm coming, Marco,” she says, and I don’t argue. I believe it. I’ve felt it too. “And I want you boys hell and gone when it hits. So you drive fast. You drive as fast and far as you can.”

It’s not until we’re well past Waco and outside the realm of Annie’s protection, Jean sleeping curled up against the passenger door, that I allow myself to think that maybe Annie had been issuing a hollow warning, unbeknownst to her. The higher I nudge the speedometer, the quieter my songbird heart grows, and in its place comes the roll of thunder.

I can’t run from this storm, and neither can Jean. We’re carrying it with us.

The only question is what will happen when the lightning finally strikes.

 


	16. Jean

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have a [tumblr.](http://southspinner.tumblr.com)
> 
> ALSO, SOME VERY IMPORTANT DISCLAIMERS  
> -There's smut in this chapter. It's finally here.  
> -In regards to said smut, I need to mention that, for the sake of accuracy, gay dudes just didn't really use condoms until AIDS became a concern, much less in the 1930's. That said, PLEASE BE SMART AND PRACTICE SAFE SEX FRIENDS  
> -Another preachy thing, do not do not dO NOT EVER try to confront someone's phobia the way Marco does in this chapter. It's a shitty thing to do and Jean calls him on it and Marco realizes that it was shitty. Please. I beg of you.
> 
> Okay, that should be all, go nuts kids

We lay low for weeks after we leave Houston. Lower than the notice of the law, but a hell of a lot lower than New York, too. I’d expected highways cutting through lush green fields two days out, but instead it’s been the same old choking dust and a repetitive holding pattern that puts us in Oklahoma one night and Arkansas the next, back and forth, the same pitted roads and the same dried-up towns hunkered down alongside them.

I know better than to ask when the constant tension curled in Marco’s shoulders warns me against it, says that I probably don’t want to know. When we’re in the car, flying up the road with the engine humming in the floorboards under our feet and our fingers braided together over the gearshift, he acts like it’s all fine. He smiles and laughs, tells me stories about close scrapes that he and Connie got out of while they were working for Annie. It’s when we’ve picked out a motel that we haven’t stayed at before and settle in - never more than three nights at a time, have to keep moving, have to not draw attention - that things seem a little more dire, Marco’s gaze drifting off to something I can’t see. He’s preoccupied, distracted, but not in the way he was those nights after Eastham when he’d slip away to somewhere I couldn’t reach him. It’s different. A more present sort of distress.

I keep my mouth shut, though. I don’t pry when he’ll look at the clock and duck out of the room for long stretches of time, coming back with a defeated slump to his shoulders and the circles beneath his eyes growing darker. I don’t ask.

Until I do.

February’s on the horizon by the time I finally cave, grabbing his hand when he walks back into the bare-bones little rat hole of a motel we’ve been camped out in for two nights and asking, “Baby, what’s wrong?”

Marco just shakes his head, stiff and evasive. “Nothin’.”

“Bullshit.” The surprised expression on his face when I call him on it reminds me of the person I left behind in Dallas, the me I swore I’d never be again, the one that’s been moving back under my skin to help me combat the uncertainty and the fear.

I can’t afford to be the one who only speaks up so rarely that the event’s considered an anomaly. The world has no place for quiet voices and lies maintained in the name of normalcy. My choice was made for greater things than that when I pulled a gun I had no idea how to shoot and became a wanted man for the love of a wanted man. Marco may have his conditioning and his reasons for holding the truth so close to him, but if we’re going to be in this together, he can’t keep those secrets anymore. Not when they could save or damn us both.

“Just gotta do a job soon, is all,” he shrugs, brushing the suspenders off his shoulders and letting the worn leather hang next to his knees as he starts unbuttoning his shirt. Coming back with the look of someone who’s seen oncoming doom and retreating to bed so he doesn’t have to talk about it. This is the pattern we’ve fallen into. “We’re almost to the end of our cash. I’d head up to Oklahoma City, but it’d be too far from the state line if shit went sideways. We’ll have to do a gas station or something here in the next few days.”

“You know what I’m asking, Marco.” He’s still fucking doing it, still dancing around the facts like he’s afraid they’ll break me, and even if he’s right it’s not his call to make. I’m not a child, and I refuse to be his weakness. Whatever I am to him, it won’t be the helpless thing he has to protect.

Marco peels his shirt off and chucks it into a wrinkled pile at the foot of the bed, chest heaving on a weary sigh. The bruises have faded until nothing but freckles and scars remain on his skin, so familiar now that I no longer look at them and cringe. Whatever put them there is as much a part of him as anything else, and it’s been no mystery for some time now that I love all of him. All of him. Even the parts that try to shield me from a truth I need to know. Even the parts that always try to push me away from the pain he carries around, curling away the first time I pressed a kiss to one of the scars on his shoulders sometime after midnight and somewhere miles from where we are now.

That’s how Marco deals with things. He holds his sorrow close the way most people would hold a lover, tries to keep it from spilling out even if it means that it festers and corrodes. Back in Dallas, he’d gone so long without getting someone to help heal his more literal wounds that it took him being feverish and agonized before anything got done. I hadn’t thought at the time that it could be something beyond stubborn pride. It wasn’t until much later that I figured out it was closer to a code that he lives by - if no one sees you falter, it means you’re not hurt at all.

I’ve seen him falter. I’ve seen him curled up in a grimy bathtub sobbing like the world was ending, seen him drunk to the point that the fears of what loving him would do to me spilled in a slur over his lips. I’ve seen Marco falter, loved him through it and despite it, and I still can’t be sure of whether or not he hates me a little bit for it, because it means that he can’t hide from me what he could from most people.

“Been keepin’ in touch with Annie,” he finally admits, sitting down on the edge of the bed and lighting a smoke. “She was gonna get one of her contacts up in New York to set things up for us. Told me to call every few days until she had everything in place.”

“And?” He looks to heavy-hearted for the end of the story to be that simple.

“And she found out about a week ago that her contact got busted. He’s locked up.”

“What are you saying?” I know what he’s saying.

Marco reaches out and takes both my hands in his, squeezing tight like he’s afraid I’ll pull away. In the dim light of the flickering lamp on the bedside table, his eyes are dark and bottomless. “We can’t go to New York, Jean. Not until we got something waitin’ for us up there.”

My guts drop all the way to my shoes. All those months letting myself dream foolish dreams about spotlights and the gleam of polished brass, every little spike of hope I let myself feel when he pulled me close and whispered that I was going to be a star, his star. All for nothing. Wasted potential and pointless optimism.

_Life ain’t a fairytale, boy._

I know, Dad. I know.

“Darlin’,” Marco whispers, worry thick along the syllables. God, I don’t want to think about the look on my face right now.

“We’re stuck here.” The words are dust in my throat, choking me and kicking up a storm in my lungs.

“Annie’s doing all she can,” he says, a slow lull to his voice that would soothe me if fear weren’t coiling like an icy vise around my heart. Stuck in Dallas. Stuck in an endless cycle of motels and dusty roads. One’s not much better than the other. Marco can sense the panic humming in my frantic pulse, stubbing his cigarette out before he stands up and pulls me close as I suck in a ragged breath. His skin is warm, and he smells like whiskey  and smoke, familiar, comforting. I cling to that reassurance and to him, trying to make his words stick instead of rolling through my mind and disappearing. “We’ve just gotta wait until she can pull some strings and get something sorted. You gotta understand, Jean. City that big, we won’t make it on our own.”

“We could try,” I wheeze, knowing that I’m grasping at straws in an effort to not feel like the walls are closing in on me.

“We’re _fugitives_ , darlin’.” Marco’s being very calm about saying it, slow and simple, like he’s talking to a child. Not patronizing, just trying to get the point across when I’m too wound up to think straight. “First wrong step we made, it’d be arrest and extradition and we’d be sittin’ in the big house back in Texas inside of a month. It’s easy to hide in the country, but if we’re gonna make it somewhere like New York, we gotta have a bigger fish to swim behind, y’know? A buffer. And I can’t take you up there until I know we have that. It ain’t smart, and more importantly, it ain’t safe.”

He’s right. I know he’s right, but it doesn’t quell the storm in me, doesn’t stop me from shaking against him so hard that my legs threaten to give out from under me. I’ve never pictured myself on the inside of a jail cell until now. That’s one of my two options. Running, or prison.

Maybe the old me is gone, but I still remember the mechanics of functioning when I’m falling apart. Stomp it down. Lock it up. I manage to collect myself for the time it takes to change and crawl into bed, letting the dark bear witness to the traces of despair I can’t quite hide.

_‘It was much pleasanter at home,’ thought poor Alice, ‘when one wasn't always growing larger and smaller, and being ordered about by mice and rabbits. I almost wish I hadn't gone down that rabbit hole.’_

“You’re scared.” Marco’s seen me falter enough to know, his lips writing out the truth across the nape of my neck.

I won’t be a hypocrite, and so I nod and let him hold me as I start to shake again. “I wanna go home. I miss my mom and my sister and I wanna go back to this summer before any of this shit happened and I wanna go _home_ , Marco, and I can’t, I can’t ever go home again…”

“Hey. Hey, shhh, just try to breathe.” Easier said than done, but he knows that, remembers it from all the times that he woke up from nightmares sounding like he was fighting a war with the air to pull it into his lungs.

Too far gone to bother with pretending to be all right, I give myself over to his steady arms curled tight around me, to the pretty, whispered lies breathed into my hair that everything’s going to be all right. This has been a long time coming. Holding him up after Eastham and making a bold promise at the stroke of midnight to stop being scared, it could only last so long. The truth is, I never left the old me behind in Dallas. That scared little boy has been riding shotgun to my chance at being better all along, reaching over every so often to jerk the steering wheel, and now I’ve gone clear off the road, shaking apart at the seams against Marco’s chest.

“God, darlin’, I’m s--...” he starts, but he cuts himself off, lips pursing where they press against my forehead. I sob out another struggled breath, and Marco holds me tighter, wordlessly forgiving me for breaking my promise of strength. “I’m gonna make this work. I swear. I’m gonna make it okay.”

How? How can anyone, even him with his Cheshire Cat grin and magic at his fingertips, how can a person salvage something this broken, a situation this hopeless?

I fall into a fitful sleep to the tune of more vows that haunt my sinking consciousness, promises that one day we’ll both be famous and that this will all just be a bump in the road.

That night, I dream of a stage that turns into a wooded back road and drumbeats that turn to gunfire. I wake up to the gray light of almost-morning with a roaring headache and the nightmare slipping away like water through my fingers, but not enough to keep me from reflexively looking down, skating my palms across my own torso and surprised for some reason when they don’t come back stained with blood. There’s no sleeping after that. I end up stretched across the lumpy mattress, watching the steady rise and fall of Marco’s chest as the sun creeps in the window and across his skin.

Whatever remnants of the nightmare still clinging to my instincts make me press a seeking hand against his ribs, my mind refusing to quiet until I feel his heartbeat beneath my fingertips.

Marco gets up earlier than he usually does, getting dressed while I sit cross-legged on the bed and talking over his shoulder as he goes. “Gonna go poke around town, case out somewhere that’ll be easy to hit. You won’t even have to go in, just sit and keep the car runnin’.”

“I can help, y’know,” I grumble, swinging my feet down onto the floor and padding after him into the bathroom, the both of us ducking around each other as I’m trying to shave and Marco’s running a comb through his messy hair. “I know you didn’t bring me along just to sit there and look pretty.”

“Shootin’ cans off a fence and holdin’ up a store are two very different things, Jean,” he sighs, looking at me in the grimy mirror.

“Yeah, well, I gotta start somewhere, don’t-- Ah, _fuck!_ ” In our awkward routine trying to work around each other, Marco accidentally elbows me in the arm as I’m wiping off my razor. The jolt makes my hand slip, the blade carving a shallow furrow across my palm, and I hiss in pain, feeling my face go pale as a long stripe of liquid crimson wells up in the cut and spills over.

“Oh shit, you all right?” Frowning, he turns around just in time to see the look of horror on my face as I stare at my hand, transfixed and trembling. “Aw, it ain’t that bad, just wash it off. Right?”

The smell of copper burns my nostrils. Red soaking the carpet, the floorboards in the hall. Mom screamed until her voice gave out.

“Jean?”

Nettie cried and all I could do was hold her, just as confused and scared, but it was my job to be the strong one, always my job to be the strong one.

Marco ducks down into my line of sight, pressing a towel over my wounded hand and staring at me hard. “You scared of blood or somethin’?”

“I just. I can’t.” It’s hard to talk when I feel like my mouth is full of cotton, the sting reverberating up my arm. “After my dad, I can’t. Even little cuts, it’s really dumb…”

“Hey, no, don’t say shit like that,” says Marco, shaking his head and peeking under the towel to make sure I’m not more injured than he thought. “Sometimes little things bring back big memories. I get it. You wanna talk dumb, I could tell you about how I didn’t wear a fuckin’ belt for four years.”

“What?”

“Anyway,” he continues, dodging artfully around the question. “You just gotta come to the conclusion that those little things aren’t what you’re afraid of. They’re just pieces of it, pieces that can’t hurt you if you don’t let ‘em. Sometimes it takes a while.”

I nod, silent, still trying to get a handle on my racing heart.

“Just hear me out.” Marco says, far too casual in all of this. “You're bleeding. There is blood leaving your body. Are you dead?”

“Fuck you--”

“ _Are you dead_ , Jean?”

“You’re gonna be the dead one if you keep askin’ pointless questions,” I snap.

He rolls his eyes, knowing as well as I do that it’s an empty threat. “Are you dying?”

“Not in the immediate sense.”

“Exactly,” he nods, waving a hand like all my problems are solved. “Blood ain’t always life or death. It’s just stuff in your veins, and sometimes a little spills. Hell, my old man used to tell us that if you didn’t bleed for something then you didn’t deserve to call it yours.”

“I know it doesn’t make sense, okay?!” Bristling, I shove my injured hand under the faucet, swallow hard as the water goes from red to pink to clear. “But logic ain’t gonna make it better, not after… just fuckin’ drop it. Please.”

Some wounds don’t heal. Some scars don’t fade. And all the love in the world can’t lessen them, no matter how good its intentions may be. Marco and I can both provide evidence of that.

“Okay,” Marco eventually concedes, pressing a kiss to my temple and ducking back out of the bathroom. “I understand. You're right. I shouldn't've pushed it. Get your hand cleaned up and come out here and pack your stuff. We’re gonna do the job and then jump the state line into Arkansas.”

I don’t even remember the name of the town we’re staying in, but Marco supposedly has an eye for good job sites, passing up some for apparently obvious reasons (“There is literally a police station two blocks behind us, darlin’, open your eyes.”) and others after he looks at them for a long moment and decidedly announces that they don’t feel right. We’re miles out a dirt road halfway to nowhere when he finally stops at a lonely-looking little mom and pop convenience store with a hand-painted wooden sign and a rusted gas pump out front.

“Think there’s even enough cash here to make it worth the risk?” I whisper, watching a loose leaf of an old newspaper go blowing across the deserted yard.

Marco nods, hands far steadier than mine would be as he pulls the Colt out of the glove compartment and loads it with emphatic little clicks of the bullets sliding home into their chambers. “Places like this are miles from the bank. The folks that run it probably take a deposit into town once a week, if they even trust the bank with that much anymore. Small business like this, they might just stockpile it all somewhere. Lesson one: always better hauls from stores if you go rural, and never try to stick a place up on a Saturday morning, ‘cause that’s usually the day after they make the deposit.”

Jesus, he’s got this all down to a science. I can only sit there in quiet awe as he hops out of the car, his gait predatory and graceful. Beautiful. The realization always hits me at the most inconvenient times.

Marco leans back through the open window, a crooked smile and a white flash of teeth in the afternoon sunlight. “I’ll be quick. Just sit here and keep the car runnin’, okay?”

“Don’t do anything risky,” I warn him, something prickling uncomfortably at the base of my skull.

“Bah. I’m just committing a little bit of armed robbery. What could go wrong?”

_“Marco.”_

“Okay, okay, I’ll be careful,” he snorts, leaning further and planting a lingering kiss on my lips. “I love you, worrywart.”

I hold him close a little longer than I should, anxiety tugging tight at my limbs. “I love you too. Now get in and get out, okay?”

“Jesus Cotton-Pickin’ Christ, we gotta do something to loosen you up after this.” For all my justified worrying, Marco just laughs, spinning the pistol around his finger and fucking _sauntering_ off towards the front door of the store. Showoff.

The door closes behind him, and I start counting the seconds. A minute passes. Two. Maybe it’s Dallas all over again and there’s a cop car around here somewhere that we missed. Maybe it’s just taking him a while to get all the cash.

Four minutes. Five. The people who own this place wouldn’t be the first to keep a shotgun behind the counter.

Cursing under my breath, I grab one of the handguns from Annie out from under my seat, loading it with a handful of ammunition and vaulting out of the car, Marco’s orders be damned. A car hasn’t passed on the road since we pulled up, and the silence is eerie, almost oppressive as I prowl my way around the outside of the building, spotting a back door that’s ajar around the opposite wall from the front door.

The dull roar of my heartbeat thrums in my ears as I slip inside with held breath and my knuckles white around the grip of the gun, flattening myself against the back of a shelf of corn feed and listening for any activity at the front of the store.

“You got a safe, ma’am?” It’s the same tone of voice I’ve heard Marco use when speaking to my mother, genuinely respectful and conversational. The only response he gets is a frightened sob, though, and after a moment he clicks his tongue, and I swear I can practically see him shaking his head with that enigmatic grin playing at his lips. “Hey, now, don’t go cryin’ on me. This don’t have to be any harder than you make it. Now, about that safe…”

The woman at the counter blubbers something else, but after a moment there's a heavy clunk of metal and the rustle of something being put into a bag.

“And all the valuables in there too, if you don’t mind,” says Marco, followed by the sound of him poking through the back and letting out a hum of approval. “Thank you very much, ma’am. You have a nice day, and I hope you don’t mind the inconvenience too terribly.”

The flicker of a shadow up near the front of the store isn’t in the right place given where Marco’s voice is coming from, and the thought sinks home with an icy urgency when I finally put together the missing piece.

If Marco’s up front taking all the cash from Mom, where’s Pop?

As it turns out, he’s three shelves in front of me, lining up the sights of an ancient shotgun when I step up behind him and level the barrel of my pistol against the back of his head. “Drop it.”

Marco, who’s got one foot out the front door, jumps about a foot in the air, whirling around with wide eyes. “What in the high holy hell are you doing in here?!”

“Saving you from gettin’ a load of buckshot where the sun don’t shine, apparently,” I drawl, tutting out a warning when Pop squirms a little too suspiciously and jabbing the handgun against his head with a little more force. “Ah-ah, don’t even think about it, you’d be dead before your finger touched the trigger. Now put it down, nice and slow.”

He complies, and across the store Marco’s looking at me with a positively _dangerous_ flash in his eyes, a slow-burning smile growing around where he’s got a full bottom lip pulled up between his teeth. “Well, get a load of you.”

“‘I can handle it on my own,’ he said. ‘What could go wrong?’ he said.” The hand that isn’t holding the gun perches on my hip, eyebrows raised at him in expectation of an apology that I don’t get.

Instead, Marco just ambles over, casual as you please, scoops the shotgun up off the floor with an easygoing “I’ll be takin’ this. And you two’ll be headed back behind the counter, easy does it.”

Once we get Mom and Pop corralled behind the counter, we back slowly out the front door, watching for anything else that might come at us out of the blue. Just before he shuts the door and we run for it, Marco leans back in and tips his hat, the most scintillating grin lighting up the room around him. “Much obliged, folks, really. Your charitable contribution is very much appreciated.”

It’s an understatement to say we haul ass to the car after that.

We’re a mile up the road with the engine roaring before my heart even starts to calm down, my first rational thought to reach over and give Marco a good hard smack on the back of his head, knocking his newsboy cap off into the floorboards. “You reckless, senseless  _son of a_ \--”

“You look dead sexy holdin’ a gun, you know,” he muses.

I sputter on the end of my insult.

Which, of course, is exactly what Marco wanted, that dangerous smile playing out again as he drops one hand from the steering wheel to my knee, squeezing hard. “I didn’t really have time to think about you saving my life and all ‘cause I almost fuckin’ _lost it_ just watchin’ you. Outlaw looks good on you, Jean. Damn good.”

“Are we just gonna ignore the fact that you almost got shot?” I choke, trying to will the redness from my cheeks, trying even harder to hold back the rush of white heat in my veins and remind myself of the fact that this is _not_ the time for my goddamn traitorous cock to be showing any interest in Marco’s hand sliding deliberately up my thigh.

He throws his head back and laughs. “Darlin’, if I had a nickel for every time I’ve almost gotten shot, I wouldn’t have to rob folks for a living.”

I contemplate squirming down in the seat to move his touch where I want it, but before I can finish the thought he’s tossing the burlap bag he hauled from the store into my lap, heavy enough that the breath leaves my lungs in a painful whoosh. “Behold, the fruits of our labor.”

“Behold the fruits of me havin’ a goddamn heart attack and you gettin’ off on me holding a deadly weapon,” I grumble, but all trace of my displeasure disappears once I get the bag open and catch sight of the fucking _stacks_ of cash inside, valuables too, gold pocket watches and good silverware. Gaping, I reach down inside and pull up one bound handful of bills, flipping through them with a low whistle. “All this from a general store?”

“Rural general store on a Thursday outside an urban center,” Marco nods, self-satisfaction oozing off of him as he pulls off the road and drives back towards a farm that looks like it’s been abandoned for the past decade, long before the Depression hit. “I have a system, and the system works. Go ahead and say it. I’m good.”

“You _are_ good,” I admit, tying the bag off again. Marco pulls the V8 into the dusty shadow of the rotting barn, killing the engine and looking over at me with a smirk. I swallow hard. “Uh… the state line?”

“We need to wait here ‘til it gets darker in case the law decides to come sniffing around. Go on, hop out.”

I should see it coming. I really should. But my lack of foresight only serves to rob me of my composure even more efficiently when I shut the passenger door and he’s on me in a second flat. The world goes still and he’s kissing me breathless with this manic little grin against my mouth, all hard presses of hands and teeth and lips that disconnect with a lewd, wet pop when he pulls back, eyes half-lidded and dark. “I mean it. You look dead sexy holdin’ a gun.”

Everything falls away. The longing in the center of my chest for a home I can never have again, the fear and the loss, it all spirals down and gets lost in him. I don’t miss it.

And it shouldn’t make me so goddamn _dizzy_ , the way his lips feel ghosting warm and wicked across my neck, clever hands splaying out against the small of my back. Even getting Marco to sleep easy has been a chore since Eastham, but this, his smirk against my skin and the easy confidence in the way he holds me exactly where he wants me to be, this is something different. Someone different.

He swore in Houston that he’d be better. My head spins at what I now know _better_ means.

“Want you,” he whispers, breath humid in the hollow of my collarbone.

I shudder, struggling to orient myself. “Okay.”

“Okay?” Marco pulls back, the ghost of a frown tugging at the corners of his lips. “Listen, if you don’t want to--”

“No! No, I do, I just…” Groaning, I bury my face in my hands to hide the redness flooding my cheeks, cursing everything. “I got no idea what the hell I’m doing. At all.”

And he _laughs_ , the cocky son of a bitch, he laughs dark and addictive against the column of my throat and runs his hands up my sides and whispers, “Don’t you worry, darlin’. I’ll take good care of you.”

God help me, I’ve been doomed from the very start.

“It’s simple enough, y’know,” he hums, almost contemplative as he slides the buttons of my shirt open one by one, maddeningly slow. “You get all caught up thinkin’ ‘bout the mechanics of it because you _are_ a mechanic, but in the end it’s all about finding what feels good. That’s all you gotta tell me. I’ll take care of the rest.”

“Fuck,” I whisper, and a curse has never sounded so much like a prayer, hands scrabbling to help with the shirt before Marco pushes them away, still keeping up the torturous pace, one button, languid kisses on every exposed inch of new skin, another button.

“Just let me.” There’s something almost plaintive in the words, and I realize with a hot stab of guilt that he _needs_ to take this at his own pace. Trying not to squirm too much, I let out a heavy exhalation and relax against the side of the car, fingers tangling in his hair as the shaky sigh gets lost in the musty air of the barn.

The worn cotton of the shirt slips down over my shoulders, the fabric hanging loose from where the sleeves still cling at my elbows, and he wastes no time in writing all sorts of silent sins across my skin, lips skating across my collarbone and setting every nerve aflame. I feel like I’m heavy and floating all at once, something sinking hot and leaden in my gut even as my head spins with him, a kind of drunk that I didn’t know it was possible for a person to get.

“Have you thought about this?” Marco’s voice is velveteen, sinful and soft around the edges, at odds with the way his hands drop to my hips and hold on _tight_ , pulling a gasp from the back of my throat. “About me?”

The gasp is gone before I can hold it back, a hand tightening in his hair and a fragile breath of, “Yes.”

“I figured,” he hums, thumbs pressing over the top of my waistband. “Been thinkin’ about you since July, y’know. How you always press into me like you want me to kiss you harder. Makes me think you’ll probably like it rough.”

And then there’s the delicious, stinging pressure of teeth sinking into the sensitive patch of skin behind the hinge of my jaw, and everything goes white for a moment. I don’t notice my ragged intake of breath, the way my knees buckle, but I feel the firm steadiness of Marco’s hands holding me up clear at the core of myself, feel the dark little laugh against my neck all the way down to the marrow of my bones.

“Holy shit, you’re responsive.” He’s almost reverent saying it, and I remember him whispering the same thing the first time he kissed me. So much has changed since then, but the way he touches me hasn’t, the way he’ll look at me sometimes like he’s not quite sure I’m real. I dig desperate fingers into his shoulder through the thin fabric of his shirt, half reassurance and half a frenzied effort to keep myself upright, and Marco smiles against the bruise that I can already feel forming, inexorable proof of his presence blooming beneath my skin. “So pretty like this, Jean, you wouldn’t believe.”

And that’s _it_ , out of everything, that’s what ends up going straight to my dick and sends a bolt of electricity down my spine and makes me  _convulse_ against the steadiness of his grip, not even having the will to be ashamed of the fucking _whine_ that reverberates in the back of my throat, spine arching and hips rolling forward against his in some visceral attempt for contact or friction or _something_ other than the hatefully slow progress of his lips pressing hot open-mouthed kisses across the curve of my shoulder.

“Yeah, there it is,” he nods with a smirk, nipping at the ridge of my collarbone and pinning my hips back against the side of the car so I can’t even twitch forward in some attempt at relief. I don’t even have time to finish the pathetic little noise of protest that’s building along the backs of my teeth before one of Marco’s hands moves up to my wrist, spinning me around and _slamming_ me back against the V8’s hood, and this is all too much, too much and too good and he’s fucking _hard_ when he grinds his hips up against my ass and chokes out a little groan into the side of my neck. I may or may not pass out for a second or two, brought back by his tongue laving against the shell of my ear and the throaty whisper that washes hot against the damp skin. “Gonna be so good to you. After you beg for it, ‘course.”

Between him and the car, there’s not much room to squirm, but I try my damndest anyway, hands reaching back and pawing at his shirt until he has some sort of mercy and sheds it in a hurry, baring tanned skin and freckles and the lines of a body I’ve held so close so many times, but never close enough. I used to have a sense of decency, of shame, but it evaporates in the wake of arching up until his torso is pressed warm and solid against my spine. I’m not sure if the noise that comes out of my mouth is begging or even something close to it, but Marco seems to catch my drift, fingers lacing delicate and gentle in my hair before they yank back _hard_ and a broken cry spills from the center of my chest, hanging in the air until he bends forward and catches it between his lips, licking its remnants off my tongue until I’m shaking against him, hands grasping for something to hold me to reality.

“P-please,” I manage to choke out, worrying his bottom lip between my teeth and pressing trembling hands to the sides of his face. “Please, baby, pleaseplease _please_ …”

“Please, _what?_ ” He grins, unflappable, merciless, pulling a bit harder at my hair and laughing under his breath when I’m driven to grind up against the side of the car in desperation.

If it’s even possible, my face goes redder, eyes fluttering shut. “Don’t even know what to ask for.”

“You do. _Say_ it, Jean.”

I’m fairly certain it’s some kind of out-of-body experience, cheeks hot and eyes screwed shut as I let my head fall back against his shoulder and whisper, “Fuck me.”

“ _There_ we go.” With a wicked smile, Marco spins me back around and kisses me so long and hard that the whole world tilts off kilter, deft fingers popping the fly on my pants and skimming across my clothed erection, the corners of his mouth twitching upwards when I curl into him and let out a frantic groan against his lips. “That’s all you had to ask, darlin’.”

“You’ll have to tell me if I do something wrong,” I warn, trying to regain control of my own breathing and pressing stuttered kisses along the sharp ridge of his cheekbone.

“Oh, shut up.” His eyes are shades darker, pupils blown wide as pennies as they roll upwards and he dips down to pepper faint kisses down my sternum. “Just tell me what feels good, all right?”

It’s all I can do to nod, watching with wide eyes while he sinks to his knees on the dusty floor and fiddles with the catch of my pants, tongue poking out between his teeth in concentration. It’s maybe five seconds that feels like an eternity.

My jeans peel from me with ease, but my boxers catch on the soft hairs of my thighs, damp and shaky, their rough band scraping along the sensitive flesh on the insides of my legs. Marco smirks as he pulls them away, bottom lip drawing up between his teeth, and I am far too exposed for all of this, feeling like curling into a ball even as he smooths his palms up the backs of my thighs and over the curve of my ass, grinning like a kid in a goddamn candy store. “Fuckin’ hell, look at you.”

I’d really rather not. It’s easier to focus on Marco, on how he still manages to be so goddamn in control even on his knees, the slightest glint of teeth making my cock twitch from where it presses against his lips. His fingertips write silent words into the notches of my hipbones, a silent smirk that falls in time with a soft whisper of _mine_ lost against my skin. His tongue steals the words from my mouth as he leaves a trail of spit-slick skin in his wake, goosebumps prickling as his lips - lacquered in saliva - settle around the base of my shaft. I gasp out something that could maybe be a moan if it weren’t so helpless, so broken, my spindly fingers winding tight through his hair for grounding as he curls his tongue around my cock and allows my reactions to guide his touch.

“F-fuck,” I choke, scratchy and harsh as his warm mouth swallows my length. His fingers create twin bruises on the curvature of my hips, pressing firmer as I attempt to buck forward. Marco’s grin is warped from where his lips stretch around my cock, sloppy and sucking and perfect, and his eyes betray the hold he knows he has on me as he swallows and listens to me cry out where I fall boneless under his touch.

My insides clench as he pulls back to tongue the slit, mouth shiny and wet, torn between wanting to kiss him and taste myself on his lips and letting him continue until we both get what we want. The metal of the car is cold beneath my burning skin, the hard surface giving me leverage as I rock my hips into his mouth, and I can’t figure out what to do with my hands, bringing one up to clap over my mouth by reflex alone. It’s too much too fast; the way he doesn’t even gag as he takes my entire length, eyes like twin eclipses watching the tension in my brow. I whimper as he swallows me down again, dragging my right hand through his hair and tugging him away.

“No more,” I hum, gasping as he takes a long lick up my shaft, “ _Marco_ , ngh, I can’t--”

His hand circles me loosely, rough palm shooting sparks through my blood as he strokes at his easy pace, all too aware of the power he exerts with a brush of his fingers. “You still with me?”

Like he doesn’t already know the answer. “Not if you keep - oh, _fuck_ \- doing that.”

Marco’s lips curl into a smirk, a mirth that sends another bolt of lightning through my veins.

“I think we both know I’ll be doin’ more than that.”

Another hand spreads itself over the small of my back and down to my ass, gripping and kneading at the overheated flesh until a finger presses itself against my entrance. My body freezes underneath him but it won’t let me be a liar, my cock twitching. His filthy smirk twists into something victorious, the edges curling upwards as a lone finger passes over my weeping slit and I nearly scrabble backwards up the hood of the car, whimpering and reaching for some grasp on reality with clawed fingers.

Marco leaves me gasping for breath, pulling back until I’m mindless and reaching for him. He soothes me with a long, silent look that strips me all the way down to my bones. Eyes wide and dark, hair a mess, he breathes out, “You really are beautiful.”

And he acts like it’s a _chore_ to tear himself away, a horrid crime to go dig around in the front seat and come back with a thin metal tin perched between his fingers and a smile that’s more reassuring than lascivious. “Vaseline. Lifted it from the general store the other day. Good thing, huh?”

“Y-yeah.” Stammering is the best I can do right now, and for the first time since this all started, Marco seems to take pity on me, ducking down and kissing the insecurities off my lips as he slowly turns me back around and presses the heel of his hand between my shoulderblades, bowing me forward until I’m sprawled over the hood of the car and nudging my legs apart.

Behind me, there’s the metallic pop of the tin being pried open, Marco muttering to himself, and finally the return of a single finger, warm and slick this time as it rubs in calculated, tight circles, and Marco presses his lips to my shoulder with a hum of “Just relax, baby. You gotta _want_ it. Trust me.”

I do. Against every better judgment I’ve ever had, I do.

The world spirals out from under me as the pressure increases. I wheeze through trembling lungs as his finger sinks to the first knuckle. Whispering under my breath, I try to rationalize how a single digit can feel so invasive, how I’m supposed to take _more_ , pain mixed with the slightest jolts of pleasure. His other hand curves around the bony outline of my hip to stroke my cock and take away the discomfort until my body ignores it, pressing my hips back in a search for more of him. It’s strange that it feels so natural but so awkward at once - he pushes into the second knuckle before inserting the third, letting its weight rest, pressing against my insides. My head drops down to rest against the cold steel of the car’s frame, kiss-swollen bottom lip drawn between my teeth as the burn pulsates stronger.

 _“Shiiiiiit,”_ I grind out through clenched teeth, trying to remember how to breathe.

“You okay?” he murmurs, little bites and licks trailed out across the tense arch of my back.

“Yeah, yeah, m’fine.” A hurried response, and I can feel in the smile against my skin that he hears the desperation in it. “Don’t stop.”

“Wasn’t plannin’ on it,” Marco laughs, sucking a fresh bruise above my shoulderblade and pinning me more firmly against the car when I squirm and moan for him.

It feels like little else I’ve ever felt and don’t believe I’ll ever feel again, and as he adds a second finger I let out a sound that barely qualifies as human, shuddering and whining something mixed between his name and _please_. Still far more patient than I am, he waits another long moment, rubs at the tender stretch before a third finger presses at my rim, testing the limits that my body has left behind. I mumble nonsensical things as he fills me, spine arching at a ridiculous curve that will leave me aching from head to toe tomorrow.

And then he crooks his fingers in some decadent, impossible way, and everything flashes white for a moment.

I don’t even process the way my body turns into a livewire, a ragged moan tearing its way out of my throat and hands clawing in vain for purchase against the smooth metal. All I can feel is the liquid pleasure that bubbles up from my gut, setting me on fire and turning the fragmented begging from earlier louder and more insistent.

“Think you’re ready,” he mumbles to himself more than me, removing his fingers despite a whine of protest from me and ridding himself of the pants that poorly hid the bulge that pressed outwards until I could see every defining feature. He strokes his cock, heavy and flushed in his hand, and I see it twitch in time with his heartbeat when I spread my legs wider. Marco smirks, and my cheeks burn, spreading over the bridge of my nose, but he reaches around me and tweaks my nipple without warning. My lips pop onto a gasp, and he takes the opportunity to violate my mouth - lips and vicious teeth, leaving blooming bruises that he soothes with a hot, intrusive swipe of his tongue. I groan and let him in, hands clenching as tightly as they can along the ridge at the top of the V8’s hood.

So occupied with his chest sliding against my back, I don’t notice him dipping his fingers back into the tin of Vaseline again, don’t notice anything until I feel the slicked-up head of his cock pressing against my entrance until it slides its way inside, stretching in a way his fingers couldn’t - my back arches and he takes the opportunity to suck at my neck that trembles, caught in a whirlwind of his scent and touch. Marco whispers a whole tide of filthy things - _so goddamn pretty, darlin’, look so good takin’ me like this, gonna keep pullin’ them pretty sounds outta you_ \- and it drives me higher as he pumps his hips; jabbing thrusts that spear me deeper and deeper, pulling and pressing and prodding until I can feel him _pulsing_ inside of me, claiming me in some way I can't justify. He groans, pulling back, his hands smoothing down the heave of my chest until he can grip at my hips and leave twin claims, fingerprints that are more effective than any signature.

“So fuckin’ hot,” he groans, helpless, breathless. I try to protest, tell him that with the red flush creeping down over my chest and my complete lack of knowledge of what I'm doing I couldn't possibly be, but the slow burn of him in me takes my thoughts, wiping them clean and leaving nothing but a gaping hole for more. My cock throbs between my stomach and the car, smearing precome across the paint, but I can’t will my hands to move from where they clench at the hood, knuckles white and burning. “Just look at you."

The dry husk of his voice tingles through every part of me, and I’m blushing and flushing at the same time; the air is humid as my jaw hangs open, panting with each thrust as he knocks the wind from my lungs. I hold on for dear life and let my head fall back against his shoulder, willing myself not to come yet.

A hand against my stomach makes me open my eyes, and I turn enough to lock gazes with him; his sight has moved from his cock pushing into me to my face, studying and calculating. Him looking at me when I’m like this, spread open and squirming, is too much, and my limp arms do their best to pull him back down to combat how cold it’s gotten without his skin pressed to mine.

Marco follows, looping an arm around my chest and pulling me back into a sloppy kiss, and the new angle makes his hips stutter for a moment before the thrusts become shorter, more of a grinding motion into me that makes me choke on a moan - he steals the sound from my throat and licks his devil’s tongue across the roof of my mouth until I’m lost in him, completely out of touch with reality. I can’t feel anything except him inside me or the burning of my body.

He feels it; his body curls into me, and one of his sinner’s hands snakes down until it circles my aching cock, running his wet fingers up my shaft. My whole body jerks, but I refuse to break eye contact as his thumb traces my leaking slit and spreads my own arousal down and further still to where we’re joined. Marco’s eyes are so dark, deep and warm; his hips grind in and I cry out into his waiting mouth.

“Fuck, _Jean_ …” he murmurs, and my name in his rough voice nearly undoes me. “Look so good, darlin’. Sound so good; love seeing you like this...”

I’m so far gone, lost and fighting for my grip on the world until he hits that spot that his fingers grazed earlier and I fucking _scream_ , nails scrabbling for purchase on the hood so hard that a single score is scraped into the black lacquer and my entire body spasms, a gasp pulled past my lips. “Holy shit that feels so - _fuck_ , Marco!”

A hand comes up to fist in my hair again, yanking my head back until merciless teeth nip down hard along the soft flesh of my earlobe and he growls into my ear, _“Say it again.”_

There’s nothing coherent left of me. I’m brainless, chasing the impending orgasm sinking heavy in in my stomach and willing to do anything I’m asked to get there, sprawled across the hood of the car and rutting shamelessly back into him and sobbing out a frantic mantra of “Marco, Marco, _Marco - fuck!_ ”

The world stops making sense. Everything caves inward,  splinters to pieces, and another ragged scream rips up my throat. I _writhe_ , there’s no better word for it, squeezing every last ounce of pleasure from his body pressed to mine as I come around him and over his hand. It’s an eternity before I can process the way his hips stutter and his rhythm falters before growing harder, faster, the overstimulation yanking any chance at a breath I might have had away from me.

Sometime after I feel him stumble and tense, his length pulsing and swelling as he spills himself deep inside of me, a mumbled string of my name laced with profanity lost in the sheen of sweat clinging to my neck.

A long, heavy silence follows, laced with ragged breaths. I feel drained, exhausted and still clinging to the hood of the car as I make an attempt at speaking English. “F-fuckin' hell.”

Marco laughs behind me; I can feel it reverberating through my back. A slick hand traces up my stomach and over my chest until callused fingers are brushing my bottom lip, and I lick and suck the mess from them, not bothering to think until he’s pulling out of me with a fragile little groan shared by me that I’m tasting myself, salty and bitter mingled with the earthy flavor of his skin.

“Holy shit,” he hisses, attention shifting downward, and there’s a definite soreness up my spine and a warm wetness across the backs of my thighs that I’d been too high to notice until now. I wince and squirm a bit.

“Do I gotta sit in the car like this?” I ask, frowning.

Marco starts cackling, either from a post-coital high or a surge of amusement at my discomfort, sweaty and sticky as he curls around me and laughs into the space between my neck and shoulder. “Oh shit, I didn’t even… we’ll find somewhere between here and Arkansas for you to clean up, baby, I promise.”

I groan, both out of annoyance and a spark of pain that shoots up my spine when I bend over to grab my shirt and pull up my pants, a pervasive burn that lingers even after I’m perched as carefully as I can be in the passenger seat.

“We weren’t waiting for the law to clear out, were we?” I ask as Marco starts the engine. He laughs again. Bastard.

“I just…” His smile slackens, shifting to something a little more contemplative. “Wanted to do it before I could overthink it. Fuck, that sounds awful, I don’t mean…”

“No, I get it.” Some wounds don’t heal. Some scars don’t fade. Sometimes we have to time the way we move through life so old injuries don’t open again. “Are you okay?”

“More okay than I’ve been in a long damn time,” he nods, driving up the road and away from the setting sun. “Are you?”

“I mean, I’m sittin’ here with a sore ass and I’m pretty sure you threw out my back, but…” Marco seems more at ease when he smiles, and it’s contagious, pulling a contented sound from the deepest part of my chest as I rest my aching spine against the back of the seat. “I guess I just… I didn’t know what to expect. For lightning to come out of the sky and smite me? Some kinda scarlet letter? Not for…”

“Not for what?”

I shrug, looking out the window at the barren earth stretching as far as the eye can see. “Not for somethin’ I’ve spent my whole life thinking made me wrong to feel really goddamn right.”

There’s a flash of unadulterated fondness across Marco’s face as he guns the engine a little more, but he has the good grace to wait until I’m on the better end of a bath in a nice hotel room in Fort Smith, Arkansas before he pulls me in and kisses me again, pulling me into his arms and refusing to let go.

For once, he falls asleep before I do. Lying in the dark of yet another hotel room in the wee hours of the morning, I think about my options again, really _think_ about them this time, unencumbered by panic or knee-jerk reactions. I think about my wish to go back to life before the rabbit hole, my family and the garage and my scripted existence. I think about sirens and cold steel bars and a life in a cage. And while that future is a possibility, it’s just one facet of the choice I made. My real option is curled up next to me, finally peaceful in sleep the way he deserves to be, and it’s in the flutter of his eyelashes and the sleepy murmur clinging to his lips that I come to the conclusion of something I’ve always known.

I’d choose him again. Whatever higher power there is could run me through this life a thousand times, a thousand more summers in the dusty Dallas heat, and I’d still choose him. I will always choose him. And there’s a small, hopeful place in my heart that wants to believe that if confronted with the choice of his headlines and history books versus the way my voice sounds wrapped around his name in better praises than any of them could ever give him, he’d choose me too.

In the face of everything falling down around us, we can choose each other. I wouldn’t want it any other way.


	17. Marco

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Woah, it's been a while! I'm working on this fic simultaneously with [The Gifted](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2891591/chapters/6454901) along with school, so updates might be a bit slow. Hope this one was worth it!
> 
> I have a [tumblr.](http://southspinner.tumblr.com)

I’ve got this theory about Jean. He’s the type to start careful, to skirt around things in life he doesn’t understand because that’s how he’s made it this far. He’ll circle at a distance, watching, darting just close enough to get a glimpse before he jumps back again. And he’ll spend days, weeks, months doing this, his orbit growing closer and closer until he decides that whatever he’s missing is worth the risk, and then he dives in headfirst. Once he figures out that he likes something, there’s no taking it from him.

Over the next month or so, Jean figures out two important things about himself. He likes robbing folks, and he likes sex. I can’t help but feel like I’ve created a monster.

It’s a monster I’m all too happy to keep company with, though, a system I’m all too happy to settle into. Our holding pattern expands to a four-state radius – Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and a night spent in Texas here and there – and it’s pretty much the same itinerary in different settings. Do a job. Drive like a bat out of hell. Find a motel room. _Break_ said motel room by fucking on every solid surface. Call Annie. No news yet, Squirt, keep checking in. Move on. Do a job.

I’ve never done well with the idea of my life slipping into a rut, but goddamn, give me a shovel, I’ll dig this one for myself.

Jean rolls off of me somewhere in Middle of Fucking Nowhere, Oklahoma one innocuous night with a satiated little groan that turns into breathy laughter. We’ve both learned that the harder he gets off, the giddier he gets, and that information should make me feel anything but all fuzzy and affectionate.

“You okay?” I pant, still trying to claw my way up out of the white noise in my brain.

He just laughs harder. “Can’t get my fingers to move enough to let go of the damn headboard.”

“That good, huh?” I ask through a breathless smile, careful hands prying his elegant fingers one by one off the creaky brass headboard. I was never used to gentleness before.

I’ve stopped trying to silence that songbird in my chest now that I’ve got the freedom to spread my own wings again, but sometimes its songs are unfamiliar, and I don’t know what to do with them. I’m learning to love as much as Jean is learning to be free. It’s a mutual progress that we help each other with as we go.

Maybe I’m having trouble seeing the change in myself, but seeing it in him is the easiest thing in the world. It’s there in how the hands that used to shake around the grip of a gun are as steady as if he were holding his trumpet instead, in the way the spark in his eyes shifts from fear to anticipation when we pull up to do a job. It’s there in how his crooked smile blooms into a smirk that makes me weak in the goddamn knees, in how he _knows it_ and wields it in a way that’s far more deadly than any trigger those musician’s fingers could wrap around.

It’s there in the way he flops over on his back beside me, all flushed and fucked-out, lights a cigarette and says, casual as you please, “Fuck it. Let’s rob a bank.”

“Yeah?” I laugh, pulling the rumpled sheet up around my waist before deciding it’s to hot for common decency and kicking it off again. “Where’s this coming from? I mean, you hear talk of someone gettin’ a wild hair up their ass, but apparently all it takes for you is—“

“Don’t even say it, Marco.” He’s trying hard not to smile, breathing a cloud of smoke out through his nose and rolling over to perch his chin on my shoulder. “But why the hell not, though? We’ve been hitting convenience stores and gas stations for a month, and there ain’t profit in that shit when the entire haul goes to motel rooms and food.”

“Says the man who bought a Brooks Brothers suit last week.”

“I mean _real_ profit,” Jean huffs. I kiss the pout off his mouth, and he holds his cigarette up to my lips long enough for me to take a drag. “I’ve sent fifty bucks home since we went on the road. That ain’t much. But if we hit a bank, we have weeks of room and board money and cash to spare. One job, and I can send a few hundred bucks home; maybe we can stay in some nicer places… We should be working smarter, not harder. It’s just good business practice.”

He has a point, which scares me. The hauls we’ve been pulling in are barely worth the risk it takes to get them, and it’s only getting harder to find places to stay that we haven’t used before. There are only so many shitty motels along the same old stretches of road. Jean’s line of thought makes sense, but what’s frightening is that I should have thought of it before him. God knows I’ve been doing this longer, that I know the business better. I’ve gotten lazy in our methods. I’ve grown so complacent that the idea of change throws me off, and that’s dangerous. Complacency is a slippery slope in the game we play. One day it’s not enough money to send home, and the next it’s a bullet to the brain.

Still, I try to play devil’s advocate. “Annie said to stay clear of banks.”

“Annie also said that we’d be in New York a month ago.” He’s got me. I can’t argue with that.

Jean doesn’t bring the subject up with the same longing that he used to, but there’s still a bit of it clinging to him, sitting quietly in the dark corners of the jazz bars we stop at whenever we’re in a bigger city. He’s stopped asking me for news from Houston, but there’s a measure of desperation when he tries – and sometimes succeeds – to talk his way up onstage with his trumpet. With the lights in his eyes, he can pretend he’s anywhere. It’s not until we’re back out on the road that reality hits him, shoulders sagging for a moment before he pulls himself back together. He’s accepted the situation, but he’s not content with it. What kind of world is this, that I can feel settled while Jean can’t?

“But we had a plan—“

“Annie’s plan,” he whispers, kiss-swollen lips painting smoky truths down the angle of my jaw, “has gone to shit, baby. She had nothin’ for us last week, or the week before that. She won’t have nothin’ next week, or the week after that, or the week after that, and we’ll sit down here and run the tires off that damn car and never put one toe outside the Dust Bowl if we put all our faith in Annie’s plan.”

“And you think doing a bank is gonna help our cause?” I mutter, snatching the cigarette from between Jean’s fingers and finishing it off, stubbing it out on the edge of the nightstand. “Trust me, I’m as interested in a heap of cash as you are, but I don’t see how a bank robbery’s gonna put us any closer to New York than we are now.”

Jean just grins like he knows some sort of big secret, rolling out of bed and hurrying across the room with an agility that one wouldn’t expect from someone who just got fucked so hard his fingers had to be pried off the headboard. “Got something to show you.”

I laugh and scoop his discarded shirt off the floor beside me, rolling the fabric into a long coil and snapping it against his bare ass as he walks past me. “Nice view, darlin’, but I don’t see what it’s got to do with business proceedings.”

“You little…” He yelps, dodging my next attack with the shirt and snatching it out of my hand. I give him the most innocent look I can muster. Jean rolls his eyes and picks up a folded newspaper from his bag, tossing the shirt at my head as he climbs back into bed. “Picked this up while we were doing that gas station in Wichita Falls the other day.”

“I had the proprietor at gunpoint, and you thought it was a good time to catch up on the news?”

“You had it under control.”

“Last time I fuckin’ trust you for backup!”

 _“Anyway,”_ Jean cuts in, flipping past the first few pages and pointing a tiny scrap of an article out for me. “I saw this and got to thinkin’.”

 _“Search continues for Eastham fugitive and accomplice…”_ I mutter, fingertip tracing over the newsprint. “Big deal. They’ve been running these little snippets in the Eastern part of Texas for weeks. They’re just trying to cover their bases, Jean; it don’t mean nothin’.”

“But it could,” he says. I’m not used to his smiles looking so feral. “It could mean something. We could make it mean something.”

“Yeah?”

“Look. You said you didn’t want to go to New York until we had a bigger fish to swim behind, right?” Jean asks, waiting for me to nod before he continues, pointing at the article again. “And up until now, the plan has been for us to get in with someone on Annie’s merit. Well, Annie’s merit went to shit when her contact got locked up, so I say we get in on our own merit. We make enough noise down here to move these little snippets to the front page, make people start payin’ attention… give it a few months, disappear, head up North, and by that time our reputation’ll precede us.”

Pursing my lips, I read over the article again. “That could work. It’s the best option we got, at any rate. Could be dangerous, though.”

“Which is exactly why you think it sounds like fun,” he says.

A slow, wide smile betrays any argument I might have made to the contrary. “We make a little noise.”

“Just a few months’ worth,” Jean nods, setting the paper aside and nuzzling into the crook of my neck.

There’s an anticipatory heat pricking in my veins, the spark that Jean knows he’s fanning catching without fail. I always knew that he’d become most dangerous once he knew the effect he had on people, especially me. “Start doing bigger jobs, bigger hauls. Nothing too ambitious just yet, but we gotta start somewhere.”

Slow kisses pressed to the side of my neck, a smirk curved across my skin. “You’d get your front-page write-ups.”

“Get folks talkin’ two, three states away.”

“We could be _famous,_ baby.”

A little hum of approval rattles at the back of my throat, fingertips tracing up his spine and relishing the shiver I earn in response. I’ve been digging my own rut for a month, but there’s a certain seductive call to the idea of driving right off the proverbial cliff. I smirk and reach up to lace my fingers through Jean’s hair, pulling back just hard enough to make him gasp, our noses brushing. “You wanna rob a bank?”

His eyes light up, blown pupils sparking with that little candle flame he’s always carried around grown to a full-out bonfire. “I wanna rob a bank.”

“You wanna rob a bank, darlin’?”

“I wanna rob a _fuckin’_ bank.”

This isn’t the scared boy I knew in Dallas, set in his ways for fear of getting addicted to free air and trying to put down roots in dry land that would only make him wither. It took months and heartbreak and me losing a few crucial parts of myself that I’m still trying to get back, but the ridiculous, sentimental part of me that I can’t shut up anymore says that seeing Jean like this, free and finally happy, is worth it. I may have stolen him, but the mischief in his eyes, the way his hands don’t hesitate as they skate down across my chest, that was all hard-earned. I will never stop being caught off-guard by how beautiful he is, how foolishly in love I am with the crooked lines of his smile.

Jean laughs, soft and far too sweet for the impish look on his face as his lips brush the shell of my ear. “You want me so bad right now, don’t you?”

“You can’t just tell a man that you wanna rob a bank with him and expect him to remain composed.”

He just grins down at me, the tip of his tongue poking out between his teeth, and swings a leg over to straddle my hips. I stop thinking about much else after that.

* * *

 We end up in a tiny, dried-up town called Spiro that’s a stone’s throw from the Oklahoma-Arkansas border, driving the V8 around the same three-block stretch to case out the situation around the only bank for miles. No cop cars, no police station near enough to do anything before we get in and get out, only a few people in the lobby. It’s almost too good of a setup. Then again, that could be the nerves talking. I’ve only done one bank before, and that was the shitshow that happened in Waco that led to me, Connie, and Bert all getting thrown in the McLennan County lockup.

“We should probably ditch this car soon,” Jean says, breaking the silence as he fiddles with the revolver in his lap, popping open the chamber and closing it over and over again. “We’ve got the extra plates, but there’s only so many black V8s in this part of the country.”

“Even fewer that have a big scratch down the hood,” I nod, looking out the windshield to the long score across the paint. Jean’s cheeks flush a bright pink. I laugh, and it helps shake off the jitters.

“You think we’re good?” He asks after our umpteenth pass in front of the bank, leaning over to look past me.

“Good as we’re gonna get. Ideally, you want a couple days to case a place out. We’ve been in Oklahoma too long, though; don’t wanna stay for the time that would take.” Don’t want to give myself enough time to remember past failures that would make me scared and sloppy.

“Why not just go hit somewhere in Arkansas, then?”

“Jesus, Jean, just let me handle it!” I snap, pulling the car into an empty spot on the side of the street. “I know the ropes a hell of a lot better than you do.”

“It was a reasonable question; don’t bite my head off,” he grumbles, clicking the chamber on his gun shut again with a glare that hits me with a physical force. “All right, talk me through it one more time.”

I watch the silhouettes moving inside the bank lobby for a moment, fingers drumming on the steering wheel. “We both go in with a handgun and one of the shotguns apiece, and for the love of God, keep a steady trigger finger. The last thing anyone wants is for this to get bloody.”

“You ever had to shoot someone?” Jean asks, mildly interested, like he’s asking if I’ve ever been to Tulsa. Same boy that was horrified to touch a gun two months ago. Christ.

“What? No, now _focus_ , darlin’, this is important.” The sawed-off shotguns I got from Annie are under a blanket in the back seat, and I reach back to hand him one, checking out the window every few seconds. “We walk in, I fire one warning shot into the ceiling and tell everyone to get on the floor. You make sure they stay there while I get the cash, after which we get the hell out of Dodge. I’m gonna let the car run while we’re inside. And remember, steady trigger finger. Don’t get jumpy.”

“What if something happens that ends up with someone that ain’t us having a gun?”

This is how Jean works. He’s the type to start careful, to map out all the possibilities and prepare for each of them. Still, it leaves a bitter taste in my mouth to have to be the one who gives him an ultimatum that could stain his hands even as it saves his life. I swallow hard, mouth pressed into a thin line. “Then you shoot first, ask questions later, and get the hell out, cash or no.”

It’s the first time he’s looked grave about the situation, sitting back in his seat with a heavy exhalation. “Shit, I don’t want anyone to die. That’s just…”

“And no one’s going to if you follow my lead,” I whisper, leaning over and kissing him hard before popping the door open into the midday sun. “C’mon, darlin’.”

Jean gripes about the heat as we move across the street, and I bite back a retort about the consequences of wearing a three-piece suit to a bank robbery – fucking rich kids, man – partly because I need to focus, and partly because he looks damn good in it, gleaming cufflinks and pinstripes a nice accent to the Colt clutched loosely in his hand.

The bank is small, which is good. Less area to keep an eye on, tighter space to herd everyone into. I keep the logic going to distract me from the bright hum of my nerves. Jean looks over at me a few paces from the door and smiles. “You said we were gonna raise hell. Let’s get to it.”

The door swings open with the light tingle of a bell that’s at odds with the bone-shaking _bang_ of the .45 round I fire into the ceiling. And there go the screams. “Ladies and gentlemen! There’s no need to get yourselves in a fuss. Follow a few simple rules, and you’ll be going about your day in no time. To start things off, we’d very much appreciate if y’all could put your hands where we can see ‘em.”

Hands up all around. Compliant crowd. No heroes. Good. “Thank you very much. Now, if y’all could just behave for my partner here while I attend to some business.”

Jean nods and steps up to take over. The safety on his revolver is still on. He knows how to use a gun well enough by now that it’s no accident. For some reason, my heart aches. “All right, folks, everyone on the floor, nice and slow.”

There’s only one teller working, a pretty brunette girl whose face has gone pale as a sheet and only gets paler when I walk up and perch the grip of my pistol on the counter with a smile. “Afternoon, Miss.”

She squeaks and sways a little on her feet. “A-afternoon.”

“Pretty sure you know how this is gonna go, yeah? You look like a smart young lady.” Back at the motel, we emptied out Jean’s bag and shoved all his clothes into mine. The buckles on the empty duffel click against the polished wood of the counter when I set it down, nodding at the teller. “If you could just fill that up with cash.”

I want to look behind me and check on Jean, but the first rule of doing banks is that you never take your eyes off the teller. Never know who’s going to have their finger on an alarm, or who’s going to have their finger on the trigger of a shotgun hidden under the counter. The frightened little thing I’m dealing with now doesn’t look like she’d be any more capable of shooting me than she would be of lifting a ten ton weight, but I remind myself that Ninette Kirschtein doesn’t look like she’d be able to bring a grown man to his knees with a single punch and resolve to take the teller as seriously as I would anyone else.

“Hey, should we do valuables, too?” Jean calls from the back corner of the lobby. I can’t see his face, but his voice is even, almost conversational. If someone had told me a month ago that Jean Kirschtein could hold up a bank without losing his cool, I would have laughed. And then proceeded to take my overactive imagination way out of hand on that train of thought, but I digress. Bank robbery. Attention. Time table. A sad inability to appreciate Jean in a suit holding a .45.

“We’re cleanin’ out a bank, and you wanna take valuables off of innocent bystanders who just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time? You animal.” I pause for a moment, smirking at nothing while the teller’s still stuffing the duffel bag with cash. “I knew there was a reason I liked you. Get everything except gold tooth caps; we ain’t got time to pry those out.”

“You heard the man! Necklaces, earrings, pocket watches…”

The mousy little teller struggles with the weight of the bag in an effort to get it back up on the counter, and I lean over to grab it myself. She goes stiff as a board, eyes wide and breath rattling in her throat, and that’s where I see it. There’s a difference between common fear and the deeper kind, the fear of someone who’s never had anything to be afraid of and that of someone who’s been hurt before. I think of that fragile little thing and the look I’ve seen in a mirror too many times, those tiny bird-boned limbs under the cruel snap of a parents’ misplaced ‘discipline,’ and I move slower, shouldering the bag with more deliberate motions.

“I ain’t gonna hurt you, sugar, don’t you fret,” I whisper, low enough that no one else can hear me, and wave her around the counter. “Why don’t you come on over here and sit with everyone else?”

Jean’s got watch chains and heirloom necklaces hanging out of his pockets by the time I get her herded over with the other patrons, that crooked smile stretching out across his face in a way that’s more endearing than it’s got any right to be. “We ready to head out?”

“Reckon so, yeah,” I nod, leaning up against the counter and watching the half-dozen or so people huddled on the floor. “All right, now when you folks file your police reports and talk to the newspapers, please remember that today’s business was conducted by Marco Bodt, that’s B-O-D-T, and my roguishly handsome assistant over here, Jean – that’s J-E-A-N Jean, not the Biblical one – Kirschtein, K… K-I… well, try your best.”

Jean gapes at me.

“You said you wanted to make noise,” I shrug.

“Incredible.”

“I let you have your damn suits; let me have my flair for the dramatic. Now get to the car, we got places to go.”

“You’ve got a screw or two loose, anyone ever told you that?” He shakes his head, heading for the door and stopping at the threshold to look back at me. “You comin’ or what?”

“I’ll be there in a minute. Go on.”

Everyone’s got the good sense to stay on the floor as I walk back to where the frightened-eyed little teller is huddled, kneeling beside her. She flinches, the look on her face shifting from terror to confusion when I pull a single bound stack of bills out of the bag on my shoulder and press it into her hand, tipping my hat and standing up. “A tip for the excellent service. You have a nice day, Miss.”

“What were you doing in there?” Jean asks once I’m back in the car and we’re burning rubber out of Spiro.

I shrug and nudge the gas pedal a little harder. “Public relations.”

“At a bank robbery.”

“You know the reason famous outlaws got famous?” I ask him, steering with my knee long enough to light a smoke. “Public relations. People told stories. People talked about ‘em. I was just givin’ folks something to talk about.”

“How very business-savvy of you,” Jean grins, twining the golden chain of a pocket watch between his fingers.

“Learned from the best. I got a brother who’s a salesman.”

“A Texas Ranger, a salesman, and an outlaw. Sounds like the Brothers Bodt have a whole slew of interesting jobs.”

“Well, Martin’s an accountant.”

Jean starts snickering. Then I start snickering. And by the time Spiro’s out of sight, we’re both biting back laughter and relaxing into our seats. I reach up from the gearshift long enough to give his shoulder a squeeze, watching the horizon stretch out like a limitless possibility.

And then the sirens start.

Any hint of levity drops from Jean’s face in a second flat, the fear that was so notably absent earlier flashing across his face. “What the hell was that?”

A cloud of dust behind us that grows closer, red lights in the rearview. I grin. “That’d be the laws.”

“Why are you smiling?” Jean chokes out, the color draining from his cheeks.

“’Cause this is the fun part, darlin’. I suggest you find something to hold on to.”

He heeds my advice with incredible enthusiasm, grabbing onto the edge of his seat as his eyes grow steadily wider in time with the police cars’ approach. There’s two of them, fanning out to take up the whole road so I can’t pull a U-turn. Cute.

The thing about police cars, especially older models like the ones that eventually draw close enough for me to make out in the mirror, is that they’re not built for speed. They’re heavy, slow, built for the rough terrain of back roads and old bootlegging routes. Putting them up against a V8 is like throwing an old, fat man with pleurisy into the Olympic track and field events.

“Marco,” Jean says beside me, a nervous hitch to his voice. “They’re gettin’ closer.”

“I know.”

“Think you might wanna, uh… drive a little faster?”

I shake my head, still smiling maniacally. “Not yet.”

His head whips around, eyes narrowing to thin, angry slashes of amber. “Marco! This ain’t a game!”

“It ain’t?” I humor him and gun the engine just a little, though, a surge of speed that I let taper off, and the police cars start catching up again. “Not close enough to the state line to go for a sprint yet. I’d burn the engine out, and then we’d really be fucked. You’re a mechanic, darlin’. Listen to their engines.”

Jean goes quiet for a second, eyes closing and brow furrowing as he tunes out the purr of the V8 enough to hear the rattling roar of our pursuers. “They’re gonna stall out before long if they’re not careful.”

“Exactly. They’re going full-throttle trying to keep up with me at a leisurely pace.” As leisurely as the car going up on two wheels when I whip around the next corner can be, anyway, but I neglect to mention that part, tapping the brakes to close the gap again. “Who says I can’t have a little fun?”

A bullet knocks my driver’s side wing mirror clean off.

“I think _that_ says you can’t have a little fun!” Jean screeches, sinking down in his chair as far as he can and smacking at my arm. “Now can you stop fuckin’ around and _drive_?!”

Cursing, I slam on the gas pedal and forget whatever game I was playing, swerving across the road with the tires squealing and the engine sputtering out its displeasure at the sudden change in speed. We’re maybe a mile shy of the sate line, but a mile might as well be a marathon when you’ve got people shooting at you. This isn’t the first close scrape I’ve ever had, not by a long shot. Doesn’t matter how good of a rum-runner you are or how much weight Annie Leonhart’s name pulls with the right people; you’re going to end up with the law on your tail at some point. But it’s the first time that something other than a shipment of hooch and my own ass has been on the line. Jean’s spitting out profanities that I didn’t even know existed, curled up in his seat with his head between his knees, and through the adrenaline pounding loud and hot through my veins, I realize how far gone I am where he’s concerned.

It’s not myself that I’m concerned about anymore. For every gunshot, it’s pure reflex to look his way.

“Why the hell are they shooting at us?” Jean yells over the roar of the engine, chancing a peek over the back of his seat before ducking down again. “I thought there were rules about police using lethal force!”

“You ever know those kids in school that were bigger than everyone else and got a kick out of beating the littlest kid up for his lunch money?” I ask, flying around another corner and putting it in the highest gear it will go. Jean looks at me like I’m insane, so panicked that I have to clarify. “Those kids all grew up to be cops. That’s why they’re shootin’ at us.”

The state line’s nothing much, just a lonely stretch of road and a half-decayed “Welcome to Arkansas” sign sticking up like a halfhearted beacon from the dry earth, but it might as well be the pearly gates for all I care, the V8’s engine roaring as we rocket over to the safe side of the line in a cloud of dust and burnt rubber. The police cars screech to a halt back in Oklahoma, an air of defeat in their stillness. I don’t slow down until they’re well out of sight.

Slow and shaky, Jean sits back up in his seat, the duffel bag of cash clutched to his chest like a newborn. He blinks once or twice, turns around to look at the empty stretch of road out the back window.

And he starts giggling.

Like a kid playing keep-away, he fucking _giggles,_ a wide, manic smile stretching at his lips. The sound’s half relief and half victory, and it’s contagious, infecting the air in the car and filling up my throat until I’m giggling too, clutching the steering wheel and feeling the tension in my shoulders start to seep away. The giggles turn to laughter, the laughter turns to all-out howling, and we drive down the open road like that for I don’t know how long, laughing and whooping and smiling like fools.

I haven’t felt this good in ages. Sometimes it takes a brush with a bullet to remind you that there are things in life – and beautiful boys riding shotgun with pretty eyes and wild hearts – that are worth smiling for.

We don’t stay in Arkansas. I’m too paranoid about just how far the law will go to look for us, end up driving North until we hit a campground in Anderson, Missouri  that has cabins for rent. We stop at a grocery store nearby, ditch the V8 - now too battle-scarred and recognizable – off the side of the road a mile away, and hike back, collapsing into the wobbly kitchen chairs with twin blank expressions.

“We just robbed a bank,” Jean says after a while.

I nod, dropping the duffel bag on the table and pulling it open. “We certainly did.”

“We just robbed a _fuckin’_ bank.”

“Wanna see what we got for it?” Our trip to the grocery store amounted in stuff to make sandwiches and a case of beer. I’m still too high on adrenaline to be hungry, but I do knock a bottle cap off against the edge of the table and take a long drink, reaching into the bag with my other hand to start sorting money into three piles. “All right, looks like these stacks are fifty dollars apiece, so. One for me, one for you, one for your mom and Ninette.”

“Holy shit,” Jean whispers.

“One for me, one for you, one for your mom and Ninette.”

“Holy _shit,_ baby.”

I just smirk at him and keep counting, three even piles, until there’s two stacks remaining, sitting in the middle of the table.

Jean counts up something on his fingers and reaches for a drink, shaking his head like he can’t believe it. “That’s twenty-five hundred dollars. _Two thousand five hundred dollars,_ Marco.”

“Eight hundred-some a share,” I tell him, finishing counting up my own pile before shoving it back in the bag.

He’s quiet for a long time, just sitting there with that same bemused look on his face. “Three years.”

I frown and ask, “What?”

“Three years. Mom and Nettie’s share’ll pay rent on our house for three years, and then some.”

“Or they can move to a nicer house.” Jean smiles at that, running his fingertips along the seams of stacked paper. “Somewhere in town, maybe. Or they could get a new car to replace that monstrosity of a truck you had. Eight hundred dollars’ll buy you a lot.”

“That’s over half what I made in a year at the garage,” he says, looking down at the money like he’s afraid it’ll disappear. “It wasn’t a bad salary, but we always lost so much of it paying off the debt Dad left. If we can do one job like this a month, they’ll be free and clear by Christmas.”

“Darlin’, if I’ve got anything to say about it, you and I’ll be on the front page of every rag from Telico to New Orleans by Christmas,” I hum, finishing off my beer and kicking my heels up on the table. “We’ll get famous, get _paid,_ get your folks out of the red, and it’ll be a one-way ticket to a penthouse in New York and a spot in Benny Goodman’s orchestra with your name on it.”

“Mm, famous,” says Jean, luxuriating in the word like it leaves a rich flavor behind in its wake.  “I can live with famous.”

And so can I. I spent so long being certain that Jean and I were so far apart when it came to goals, freedom versus contentment, limitless possibilities versus lost dreams, but there’s something that’s grown in him since Eastham, a nameless hunger at the core of him that I know all too well. There’s a moment that comes after you get your first taste of _more,_ a clarity that you’ve never known, and it sinks down into your bones and settles there. It never leaves you. It won’t settle for pipe dreams and could-have-beens, for picket fences and a life lived by the book. There’s a moment, and sometimes you miss it, don’t even realize it’s happened until you find out that nothing feels right without the open road beneath your heels and the wind at your back. Maybe it’s losing your ability to think rationally. Maybe it’s gaining the ability to do things that no one else would dare. There’s a moment, and it wakes something up in you, and there’s no going back.

Jean’s had his moment. It’s there, under his skin, in the spark of the wide-open world flashing in his eyes when he looks back up at me, hooked on the word _famous_ like a drug. And I’ll feed his addiction, my beautiful boy, debauched in all the right ways. I’ll feed it the way I’ve always fed my own, until we’re both so high on the thought of our names on the lips of the masses that we won’t ever come down.

“We’re gonna be in headlines, Jean, you and me,” I tell him, and it drips like honey from my tongue, one of the only promises I’ve ever intended to keep. I don’t register getting up or walking around the table, but the next vow comes out against the curve of his neck, sealed by the shudder that runs down his spine. “Headlines and hearsay and history books. Our names, right there in black and white.”

“I love you,” he says.

I’ll give him something more than love, a breath of an oath against his humid skin while my fingers fiddle with the buttons on his suit jacket and the sun sets over the Ozarks outside the shuttered windows.

“We’re gonna live forever, darlin’.”

I’ll give him something more than love. I’ll give him immortality.

Jean moves like a lightning bolt, one arm sweeping the money off the table with a rustle while the other one loops around my neck, pulling me down into a kiss that blazes and bruises. _Forever,_ I promise him in ragged breaths, in the bruises that will play out on his thighs in the shape of fingerprints from me picking him up long enough to sit him on the table, far prettier than twenty-five hundred crooked dollars could hope to be. _Forever, we’re gonna live forever; they can’t stop us._

I’d love to see them try.

* * *

 I wake up the next morning to Jean’s side of the bed empty. Too satiated and sleepy to think too much of it, I roll out of bed and dig around for a clean change of clothes, poking my head into the bathroom. “You okay if I come in there and get ready?”

Silence. The bathroom’s empty, a tiny bit of water in the bottom of the tub and Jean’s shaving kit on the sink. He’s been up for a while. Frowning, I go ahead and finish getting ready, stepping out on the cabin’s porch with damp hair and a cigarette hanging from the corner of my mouth.

There’s a phone booth next to a picnic area in the middle of the ring of cabins. I almost miss Jean huddled inside, the glass panels dirty to the point that I can only identify him from the blonde smear of his hair. Who the hell would he be calling? He doesn’t know the information to get ahold of Annie, and he’s got to have more sense than to ring up his mother. I take another drag and hop down off the porch, walking towards the booth at an angle that puts Jean’s back to me.

“—can hardly expect me to just drop eight hundred fuckin’ dollars in the mail.” He’s being quiet, speaking in an irritated hiss. I have to get right up beside the booth to hear him. “Yeah, I know. I _know,_ but how else am I gonna get it there? If you could just drive up to Denison… So do it on a goddamn Saturday; it ain’t that hard!”

Who the _hell_ is he talking to?

“How’s Nettie?” Jean’s voice grows less harsh, a long silence as whoever’s on the other end of the line answers his question. “Yeah. Yeah, I figured that’d happen. Tell her I said to cut it out.”

Another pause.

“I’m fine… Yeah… Listen, don’t you fuckin’ start with this again, Eren, I swear to God.”

“Are you outta your goddamn _mind_?” Jean about jumps out of his skin, flailing against the wall of the phone booth as his head snaps around to look at me.

When he slides the door back, he sees the look on my face and cringes. “Oh shit.”

“’Oh shit,’ is right,” I seethe, stomping my smoke out under my shoe. “Do you wanna get caught? Is that it?”

“I’m not—“

“For Christ’s sake, _please_ tell me you didn’t tell him where we are.”

“He’s not gonna—“ Jean starts, but then muffled yelling from the receiver distracts him, his face scrunching up as he holds it a few inches away from his ear. He rolls his eyes and claps a hand over the mouthpiece, the lowered tone of his voice doing nothing to soften the stubborn set of his jaw. “D’you really think he’d turn us in? Really, Marco?”

“I think the son of a bitch would personally finance a parade to follow me back to Eastham if he had half a chance,” I deadpan.

“Maybe, but he wouldn’t sell _me_ out, and right now you and I are a package deal,” he points out, nodding at the phone. “And he said he’d drive up to the state line next week so I can give him the money to take back to Mom and Nettie.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Sweetheart—“

“ _No_ , Jean.” He glares at me, but I glare back harder, arms crossed over my chest. “I don’t like him, and more importantly, I don’t trust him to show up in Denison without a whole mess of laws behind him. If we’re runnin’ money back to Dallas, we’ll do it ourselves, and we _won’t tell anyone we’re coming._ ”

More yelling on the other end of the phone, and Jean winces again. “He, uh… he wants to talk to you.”

“Oh, for the love of…” I grab the phone from Jean, holding the receiver to my ear and growling, “What do you want?”

 _“You lyin’, griftin’, good-for-nothin’, thievin’_ bastard, _the next time I lay eyes on you I’m gonna—“_

“If you just wanna insult me, Jaeger, I’ll hand the phone back to Jean and you can talk shit to your heart’s content, because – and I say this with more honesty than you believe I’ve got in me – I don’t give a fiddler’s fuck what you think.”

Eren trails off with an angry snarl, which must mean he actually has something substantial to say. _“His family is a wreck because of you, you selfish piece of shit.”_

“Last I checked, you promised to take care of his family,” I snap back, eyes narrowing, “so it sounds to me like you ain’t holdin’ up your end of the bargain.”

 _“Oh,_ fuck _you,”_ he spits, every syllable sharpened with intent to wound if not to kill. _“You listen to me, and you listen good. If anything happens to him, you won’t have to worry about the cops, you hear me? If something happens to Jean, you won’t have to worry about prison, ‘cause I’ll hunt you down and put a bullet in your head myself.”_

“Pipe down,” I laugh, more cruelly than I probably should with Jean standing here. “You ain’t got the stomach for murder, Eren.”

He goes right back to screaming insults, and I hand the phone back to Jean, who mutters a hasty goodbye and hangs up. He turns back to me slowly, like he wants to put off the confrontation as long as possible. There’s nothing in his posture that says he’s backing down, though, spine straight and head held high. “I’ve got a right to check on my family, and you can fuck right off if you’re gonna try to tell me otherwise.”

“I never said you didn’t.” For all my impatience with Eren, I at least try to stay rational with Jean. If we both start screaming at each other, we won’t get anywhere. “But there are smarter ways to do it than relying on _him,_ Jean, Jesus Christ.”

“He’s been my best friend since I was six years old,” Jean lashes back, fists balling up at his sides.

“You sure that’s it?” I hadn’t even noticed the acrid burn of jealousy in my throat until it flew too-late off the tip of my tongue. A stupid thought. A completely irrational thought.

“What does that even mean?” he says on a humorless laugh, raking a hand through his hair and slamming the door of the phone booth shut behind him.

“Nothin’,” I grumble, stalking back towards the cabin. “Never mind. Just go in and start packing up. I’m gonna go get a new car, and then we’re headed back to Dallas.”

“D’you need help?”

“You can _help_ by packing up.” The conversation is over. Jean gets it, although he isn’t happy about it, heading back inside the cabin with a sullen slant to his mouth and a radiant aura of frustration rolling off the tense set of his shoulders.

I load one of the handguns and slip it into my waistband, shrugging a vest on over my shirt to cover the grip of the pistol settled in the dip of my spine. The campsite’s a good ways away from… anywhere, really, but there are a few cottages down by the grocery store where permanent residents must live, the owners and the caretakers and people like that. I try to clear my head as I’m walking down the long gravel drive between the cabins and the other buildings, but any effort only makes everything get more muddled.

I should have learned by now that when I get emotional, I get sloppy. I do things I shouldn’t do. It’s what started this whole mess in the first place. Mess or no, I’m emotional and sloppy and in desperate need of a vehicle, skulking around the driveways of the cottages until I spot a promising looking Ford Model 40. No possibility of stealing the keys. I’ll have to hotwire it, will probably end up ditching it once we hit Dallas anyway, just to be safe.

When I get emotional, I get sloppy. I let the fact that it’s off season and there are no tourists around make me think I’m safe, rooting around under the panel of the Ford and cursing my way through getting the engine to turn over, loud, too loud. I forget that off season means that the people in those cottages are probably home, that someone’s bound to wonder why their car is starting up in their driveway. I forget that a campground’s bound to need security, that I probably should have noticed there’s a goddamn _cop_ living here before trying to steal his car and watching in some sort of horrifying slow motion as he walks out his front door reaching for something on his belt.

The only time I can ever remember Pa being proud of me is so long ago that it feels more like a distant dream than a memory of something real. I was very small, maybe five or six the day he took Michael and I out to the pasture to teach us how to shoot with a little Daisy air rifle that had belonged to all of our older brothers before the two of us. Michael had gotten to go first since he was older, struggling with the sights for half an hour before he actually managed to hit anything. He never was much of one for shooting, anyway, proclaimed the whole venture a waste of time before shoving the gun at me and letting me take the burden of our father’s scrutiny on my own shoulders.

The first time I shot a gun, I felt something. There was a little hum in my bones that knew I was going to hit the can on the fencepost the second my finger touched the trigger, some kind of magic that went from me to the pellet to the target I knocked down on my very first try.

 _True marksmen are born, not made,_ Pa had said at dinner that night, pointing his fork at me as he lectured the older boys on some topic I didn’t care about so long as I got to feel that rush that came with holding a gun again. _Some men just pick up a gun and it’s a part of ‘em, as much as an arm or a leg. Hittin’ a target’s just a reflex. And I’m tellin’ you boys, Marco here is a born marksman._

( _Have you ever had to shoot someone?_ Jean asked me. No, no I haven’t. But I could if I had to.)

From the moment I picked up a gun, it was a part of me. I’ve never felt anything but solid and steady with a firearm in my hand, just as easy as moving any other limb. And hitting a target is just a reflex. A reflex. That’s what I’ll say to justify pulling the revolver out of my waistband and taking a half-second’s aim. Safety off, finger on the trigger. A reflex.

Connie and I used to steal that Daisy air rifle whenever we had the chance, playing outlaws, pretending the neighbors' chickens were lawmen. Bang, bang. You’re dead.

It’s a reflex, pulling the trigger and holding my arm against the kick, twenty feet away from a real live person. It's a reflex putting a bullet between his eyes, standing still as a statue and watching as he crumples to the ground.

Bang, bang. You’re dead.


	18. Jean

I have become a conflict of my own interests.

The thought strikes me somewhere between packing my clothes and dragging my trumpet case out from under the bed, feeling its misplaced weight heavy in my palms. I'm at war with myself, and while that's not such a far cry from the way I was before all of this, I've been so at peace lately that the battle raging back and forth inside my head nearly renders me useless. One step forward and a thousand steps back. I might as well be back in Dallas, stuck between my family and Marco, a dangerous juggling game threatening to fall apart on me at any second. I was a fool to think that time would mean I could have them both.

Eren, as he usually does, saw that predicament a long time before I did, is trying to head the disaster off at the pass even now. That has to be why he'd agree to come upstate to get the money. He's got no love for Marco, and probably a healthy dose of resentment for me, but he's got almost as much love for my family as I do. He'll keep that part of my life afloat longer than I could on my own, even if Marco’s stubborn pride and needless paranoia makes it a little bit harder. And then…

Then what? The high from the bank robbery has faded; leaving behind the fear-laced questions I waved away in interest of getting the job done. We keep going this way, big jobs and big hauls and big risks, and we get our infamy for it, strike out North in a blaze of glory and find ourselves welcomed into New York’s shady underbelly like heroes. Or we get caught, get thrown in prison or shot, and it's all over. Dad always warned me to never play a game where the rules were all or nothing. I can't tell whether that's more ironic or hypocritical, seeing as he pissed every dollar we had and then some away at a poker table. Despite any warning, despite the promise of freedom, I can't help but feeling like I've backed myself into a corner. There are a multitude of paths in front of me, but only two outcomes.

The sharp crack of a gunshot splits the air outside, and something heavy and cold drops into my stomach, reminding me that there's never _really_ been a choice.

It's always been Marco. All logic and better judgment aside, it's always been Marco; it always will be Marco. I'm as bound to him as I was to everything I left, tugged out onto the porch by the panicked pain in my chest, any future I could have seen spiraling away. I couldn't exist outside my scripted existence. Now, watching the stillness at the bottom of the long gravel drive, I'm trying to picture existing without him and fighting the urge to collapse. Maybe it's always been that I'm just too weak to stand on my own.

A car comes screaming up the road in a cloud of flying gravel and burning rubber, and I stop having to wonder about it.

“What the hell was that?” I ask, rooted to the porch as Marco lunges out of the driver’s side, pale and clearly rattled.

“Hurry and load it up,” he mutters, shouldering past me through the doorway and grabbing the duffel bag of cash off the table.

“What happened—“

“Jean, _get your shit and get in the car,_ we ain't got time.” I can’t see Marco’s face from where I’m standing, but the way he holds himself is drawn-in and barely stable, shivers down his spine that he shakes off with a roll of his shoulders. “No time, just take what you can carry. Leave your clothes; just grab the guns and the money.”

Mom and Nettie’s share of the cash is stuffed into one of the leftover paper bags from the grocery store, sitting on top of the dresser. Marco’s sense of urgency makes it hard for me to analyze anything deeper than the apprehensive terror clawing at the back of my neck, so I do as he says. The bag of money gets shoved under my arm, the Colt gets pulled out of the nightstand drawer, and I haul ass into the passenger side of the Model 40, watching Marco run out with an armful of weaponry and chuck it into the back seat. Our checkout’s going much quicker than expected. I think back to that gunshot, swallow hard around speculations why.

“Tell me what happened,” I demand once he’s back behind the wheel, even though my gut says that I don’t want to know.

“Shit went sideways, that’s what happened,” Marco says through gritted teeth, flooring the gas pedal and rocketing back out toward the main road.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I know what it means. I refuse to admit that I know what it means.

Marco winces, nearing the little concentration of buildings down by the entrance to the campsite. “Don’t look, darlin’.”

“Don’t look at what?!”

“Just close your eyes, Jean, trust me—“

“Not until you tell me what the _hell’s_ going – oh God.”

The rebuke dies in my throat, because I don’t have to ask anymore. It’s all written out in the driveway of one of the houses at the bottom of the hill, in the empty spot where the car should be and the blood seeping out across the concrete. There’s a body. Oh _God,_ there’s a body.

I never _saw_ Dad, not beyond bloodstains and body bags, anyway. Mom pushed me away from the office as soon as I came running to see what had happened, kept me from having that image burned into my mind for the rest of my life. It must have looked something like this, though; dead-weight limbs slumped unnaturally and drained skin too pale, divested of all the blood that’s pooled around, still and stagnant like an algae-covered pond.

I lurch forward in my seat and gag, swallowing the acrid sting of bile at the back of my throat.

“Told you not to look.” Marco’s voice is stiff, cold. He keeps his eyes on the road, doesn’t even spare a glance for the destruction he’s wrought.

“You shot someone,” I wheeze, fingers clutching white-knuckled at the edge of my seat. “You _killed_ someone, Marco; what the fuck happened to no one gettin’ hurt?!”

He just keeps looking at the road, nudges the speedometer a little higher. “I didn’t have a choice.”

“Bullshit!”

“He _had a gun,_ Jean!” He’s a dust storm, bathed in deceptive calm one second and deadly the next, the sudden rise of his voice bouncing off the close quarters of the car. “How the _fuck_ was I supposed to know that there’d be a fuckin’ cop in one of those houses; I didn’t—“

“Oh God.” A low, mortified groan rumbles in my chest, and I bury my face in my hands. “A cop. You killed a goddamned _cop_.”

Silence. Marco grits his teeth and doesn’t say anything until we’re well over the state line, the only sound my ragged breaths struggling against my will to pull them in and push them out. I lose track of my place in time and space, staring out the window and unable to close my eyes because every time I do the sun bores through my eyelids and stains them red, red like blood, red like a life cut short in a driveway too few miles away.

He pulls off on some desolate stretch of road and slams on the brakes, hopping out of the driver’s side and crossing around to the back of the car. “Dig me out one of the spare tags. Someone probably got a plate number as we were headin’ out; we couldn’t get that lucky.”

“How are you so calm right now?” There’s a measure of disgust in the question that I didn’t mean to end up there. “Someone is _dead—_ “

“And if I hadn’t been faster on the draw, I’d be the dead one!” Marco snaps, yanking the tag off the back end of the car with a sharp, metallic crack before he rounds on me, eyes hard. “It was him or me. Ever hear of self-defense?”

“So you shot a man in the head out of self-defense, that’s what you’re tellin’ me.”

“I’m tellin’ you that I did what I had to!” The discarded license plate hits the ground in a cloud of dust. He yanks the replacement out of my hands with a whispered curse, still not meeting my eyes. “You get in a situation like that, your instincts take over, and when you learn to shoot, you learn how to shoot to kill. I didn’t mean for it to go down that way, but it did, and you climbin’ down my throat about it ain’t gonna change anything.”

His hands don’t even shake as he hooks the new tag onto the car. Hands that I’ve known, that run through my hair on lazy Sunday mornings and hold me steady when I start to shake apart in stolen moments of the night. Hands stained with murder.

Hands that I still trust, even though I hate myself for it.

“We fucked up,” I whisper, collapsing against the side of the Model 40 and scrubbing a hand down the side of my face. “We fucked up. We’ve gotta figure a way outta this…”

Marco laughs, the sound of it sharp and cruel and a little hysterical in the ambient silence of the empty road. He turns away from me, takes a few steps and shakes his head before he pivots back, a little spark of panic breaking his composure. “There is a dead cop back there! If there was a way outta this before, darlin’, there sure as hell ain’t one now!”

I drop down into a crouch to combat the head rush that hits me, a low, fearful groan clawing its way up my throat. “Oh God, oh my God, what are we gonna do?”

Even though my finger was never on the trigger, part of the blame rests with me. I’ve been the one who’s been so cavalier about everything, turned this into some kind of game, treating bank robberies like playdates and letting the promise of fame go to my head. Headlines and history books were Marco’s dream, not mine, but I got sucked in so fast that I never thought of the consequences. And now my carelessness – _our_ carelessness – has a body count.

I feel sick. All I ever wanted was freedom from a life that was holding me down, to take care of my family, to be with Marco. Hurting anyone was never on the agenda. Killing anyone was never on the agenda. There’s the kind of wrong you can get over, stealing money from a bank who stole it from folks with bad luck to begin with, and then there’s the kind that crawls in your stomach and under your skin, knowing that because of your stupidity someone will never breathe or laugh or love again.

I can’t handle that responsibility. I’m not even the one with blood on my ledger, and it’s crushing me.

Marco’s palms settle against my cheeks, callused and familiar, his thumbs tracing the old ghosts of shadows under my eyes. I’ve been sleeping like a baby the past few weeks. I doubt I ever will again. “Look at me. Jean, look at me, okay?”

My eyes meet his, and the calm resolve in hazel irises is so far misplaced that it doesn’t ease my mind. He should be more upset than I am right now. Marco’s a criminal by law and by deed, but he’s not the type of man to treat murder like some sort of unfortunate mishap. I look a little harder, and I find it, the beginnings of a breakdown threatening to burrow through and render him lost. What’s keeping him upright now isn’t apathy. It’s willpower.

“We have a plan,” he says, slow on every word as he rests his forehead against mine. “We have a _good_ plan. And all this means is that we can’t backpedal. We gotta stick to it. I need you to stick with me, okay. I need you to be brave. God knows you’re better at it than I am.”

“That ain’t true,” I choke, feeling hideously like I’m about to cry.

“It is.” Lips press in a fleeting breath against my temple, fingers twining up with my own to help me to my feet. “Believe me, darlin’, it is. C’mon. I’m gonna stick to back roads, so it’ll take a while to get to Dallas.”

We sit through the long hours mostly in silence, only broken by the occasional question and answer, locked up in our thoughts. I wonder if Marco’s holding it together for my sake or his own, hands continually tight on the steering wheel and a stubborn stiffness to his shoulders that refuses to bend under whatever pressure his mind tries to put on them. He stares out the windshield, and I stare out the window, and after we’re back in Texas he reaches over and grabs my hand. I feel a little steadier for it.

It’s already dark by the time we make it to the outskirts of Dallas, the Model 40’s wheels kicking up clouds of dust that somehow manage to get into the car and wrap around me like shackles, trying to haul me down and tie me back to this place even after I’ve escaped. I cough and refuse to let that irrational streak of stir-crazy set in, fists clenching in my lap as Marco kills the headlights and pulls down the road to my house, idling the engine at the end of the driveway.

“You’re not coming?” I ask, looking over at him.

He snorts and shakes his head. “I got no desire to die by way of your mother throwing things at me. Besides, I need to go find a new car and find some way to get ahold of Annie to tell her what happened. She might be able to help.”

“Oh. I just…”

“They’re your folks, Jean. I’d only be stickin’ my nose in where it don’t belong,” Marco says, leaning over and giving me a quick peck on the lips. “Give Ninette my love. I’ll be back before the hour’s up.”

A sharp, nameless fear jabs into my stomach like a spear. “What if you don’t come back?”

“I’ll be back.” And that’s that, apparently. I squeeze his hand and climb out of the car, and he drives away in a fading aura of dust.

There’s light spilling from the kitchen window, and it lights up the silhouette of my old truck sitting in the driveway, casts a shadow of Mom rounding the table with a plate of food in hand. Even through the walls and the windowpanes, I can hear Nettie spouting off on some animated story. Something in me aches. I shove it down until I can’t feel it. The level of hypocrisy in missing a home I gave up everything to escape is something I won’t allow myself to acknowledge.

The porch creaks in a familiar melody under my feet, the squeal of the hinges harmonizing when I swing open the front door, take one step into the hallway, two, three, turn to the right.

Everyone in the kitchen goes silent. Mom, Ninette—

And Eren.

It’s Nettie that breaks the spell – of course it is – flying out of her chair so fast that she knocks it over and _launching_ herself across the kitchen into my arms. “Jean!”

“Hey, kiddo,” I mutter into her messy hair, picking her up and squeezing her tight. She’s grown even in the time I’ve been gone, taller and leaning towards the same gangly side of our genetics that I do, but time has done nothing to dull the brightness of her gap-toothed smile or the laugh that gets muffled in the front of my shirt. I’ve missed her more than I know how to say.

But my warm welcome apparently stops with my sister, Mom rising out of her chair with a thunderous look that very clearly says _you have stepped in it this time, young man._ “Jean _Elliot_ Kirschtein—“

And the middle name, too. I’m fucked.

But then she’s hugging me, too, and I’m left bemused and blinking, wondering what I’ve missed, sandwiched between a giggling sister and a weeping mother who smacks me upside the head even as she kisses my cheek. “You scared me half to death, you fool boy, nearly gave your mother a heart attack, what if I’d lost you, what if—“

“Mom. Hey.” I put Nettie down, using my freed-up arm to wrap around Mom’s shoulders and pull her closer. “I’m fine, Mom. I’m okay.”

“And you could’ve given us a little warning. I’d have made chicken and dumplings for dinner.”

Her son’s rolling in off a crime spree, and she’s worried about not making my favorite food for dinner. There’s something so innocent in that, something with a pure simplicity that I haven’t seen in so long that something sharp and hot pricks at my eyes when I hug her again. “That’s fine. I can’t stay long anyway.”

“What d’you mean, you can’t stay long?” It’s the first time Eren’s spoken, still sitting in his chair and watching me with an accusing look that burrows directly under my skin, eyes narrowed slashes of green under the guttering lightbulb.

I shift my weight back and forth, letting go of Mom and scratching at the back of my head. “Marco’s comin’ back to pick me up soon.”

“You gotta be _fuckin’_ kidding me – beg pardon, Mrs. Kirschtein.”

“Ninette, I think it’s about time you were getting to bed,” Mom says, voice tight.

“Aw, Ma!”

“ _Now,_ young lady.”

Nettie grumbles, but she knows the tone of no compromise, sulks over to hug me again before she heads down the hall. “Tell Marco I said hi, and that I’m gettin’ better at ukulele.”

“He sends his love,” I nod, leaning over and kissing the top of her head. “And I love you too, Nettie. Now mind Mom and go on to bed, okay?”

No one says a word until the bedroom door shuts behind her.

Eren just sits there and stews, but Mom’s got guilt tripping down to a silence, pursing her lips and starting to clear the table. “I can’t believe that you would lower yourself to petty crimes with that _awful_ boy—“

“You used to like him well enough,” I point out, quick to the defense.

“Before I found out he was a _fugitive_!” Mom turns the sink on full-blast, water splashing over the word _fugitive_ before she whips back around to look at me. “What in God’s name was going through your head, Jean?”

That I loved him. But I can’t tell her that. I’ve broken her heart enough.

“This,” I tell her instead, dropping the paper bag on the table with a heavy thud. “There’s over eight hundred dollars in there. When’s the last time you saw eight hundred dollars in one place, Mom?”

She just frowns and shakes her head. “That’s crooked money, baby, I couldn’t possibly…”

“As long as it feeds you and Nettie and pays off our debt and helps y’all get outta this hellhole, the money could be as crooked as a goddamn dog’s hind leg and I wouldn’t care!” Too harsh. But it’s the only way she’s going to get it, still looking wounded as her eyes flick back and forth between the money and me.

She reaches forward with a delicate, trembling hand and peels the bag open, looking at the stacks of cash inside. “What would your father say?”

“Probably that I’m doing a better job ensuring your financial security than he did.”

“Your father was a good man—“

“My father was a crook who was too caught up in his losses to take care of his own family!” I lash back, slamming my hand down on the table so hard that even Eren jumps a bit. “And maybe he never stuck up a convenience store, but he wouldn’t’ve lost that much money that fast if at least some of it wasn’t dirty, Mom; open your eyes.”

She doesn’t say anything. Just stares down at the dirty dishwater and blinks back tears. She knows I’m right.

I suck in a calming breath and move around the table, bending down until I’m at her eye level and taking both of her detergent-cracked hands in mine. “He left us with worse than nothing, and he left me with the responsibility of picking up the pieces. That’s all I’m trying to do, Mom. And I don’t care how it gets done, as long as you and Ninette can go back to living like we did before. Far as I’m concerned, Marco’s the best thing that ever happened to me.”

For more reasons than one.

“You’ll say that ‘til you get shot,” Eren deadpans from the table, his anger rising along with the rest of him as he stands up. “And then what happens? What happens when you and Marco both end up in prison or dead, huh? Who takes care of your folks then?”

“We’re just gonna get enough money to get us out of debt, and then we go North—“

“He is _never_ gonna get you North, Jean!” Eren cuts me off, groaning like I’m some sort of stupid child who can’t grasp a simple concept. “He’s gonna run you around and make things worse, make things more dangerous. You’re doin’ eighty down a one-way road off a cliff, and you’re too damn blind to see it!”

“You don’t know that!” I protest, taking a step closer to him and feeling rage start to boil the fear out of my veins. “You don’t know him.”

“I know him better than you do.”

“Yeah, I bet you think you do,” I snarl, landing a sharp little shove against his chest. “Just like you think you know everything else in the fuckin’ world better than I do, ‘cause I’ve got my head up in the clouds and it’s your job to remind me that havin’ a goal outside this shithole’s a fool’s errand, right? _Right?!_ ”

“Don’t you stand there and play the victim.” He shoves me back, hard enough to almost throw off my balance, and I start winding up for a right hook.

 _“Boys!”_ Mom yells over the clamor, glaring at us both until we simmer down.

We stand there and glare at each other for a few solid minutes of angry silence before Eren darts forward and grabs me by the bicep, tugging me towards my back door. “Beg pardon again, Mrs. Kirschtein, but Jean ain’t gonna get a lick of sense in his fool head until we settle this like men.”

Mom says something, but I don’t catch it before the back door slams shut behind us and Eren’s hauling me around the side of the house, shoving me hard against the peeling blue siding.

“Gonna beat the shit outta me?” I scoff, knocking his hand away from my arm.

“I oughta.” His fingers twitch like they’d like to clench into a fist and plant an uppercut right in my stomach. He keeps them flat at his sides instead.

“You wouldn’t change my mind even if you did.”

“Which is why I ain’t gonna waste the energy,” Eren snaps, kicking at the dirt until it blooms in a cloud around his feet. “I’m just gonna tell you for the millionth time that you’re in over your head.”

“That’s not for you to decide,” I say, trying to keep my cool.

“Look,” Eren says, “whatever it is you’ve got with… with _him_ —“

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!”

“—ain’t worth your life, Jean! I’ve seen the papers! I know the shit you two are getting into, and I’m tellin’ you, it’s gonna go to hell in a handbasket real quick!”

“It’s already gone to hell!” The truth is out before I can stop it, an anger that’s not directed at Eren but at myself. He stands there and gapes at me, and I know there’s no backpedaling away from it. The truth is easier, and it feels a little like confessional, telling it to someone I know will hold me accountable. “We were headin’ out today and shit got bad. Shots fired.”

“Someone get hurt?” He asks.

I grit my teeth and look away.

“You gotta come home,” Eren says, and it’s soft, less like an order and more like a request.

“And what,” I laugh, humorless and empty, “turn myself in? Go to jail?”

“It’s better than being dead!”

Even if Eren understands, he can’t relate. He’s always been fine with his life, with the garage and fighting like hell to make ends meet, fine with the way things are. He’s never wanted anything more. But for me, Death and Dallas have always been synonymous. I’ve spent enough of my life walking around a town of people who were already dead to come back for fear of the more literal sort. Maybe Marco was right. Maybe I am brave. Or maybe I’m just stupid. There’s always been a fine line.

“I don’t know about that,” I whisper.

Eren looks like he wants to _scream._

“Listen to me,” he hisses, carding a hand through his hair, “you’ve had your fun. You’ve made your cash. But people are gettin’ _hurt_ , Jean, and I don’t want the next dead body to be yours ‘cause of that bastard. Please just come home.”

“I can’t.” He knows that. He _has_ to know that. Even if there were no consequences to just coming home, I still couldn’t. West Dallas was a slow drain on my soul before I ever even had an idea of what life without limits was like. Coming back now might as well be a gaping hole punched through the most vital part of me. I wouldn’t make it. I sat through enough Sunday school lessons about sinners turning to pillars of salt to know that I’d dry to dust and blow away.

“That’s _bullshit—_ “

“And even if I could, I wouldn’t want to.”

“Do you _hear_ yourself right now?” says Eren, more desperation in him than I’ve ever seen in one place. His whole body goes tight, fists clenching at his sides, and as he lunges forward I’m prepared for the crack of a fist across my jaw. But all I get is his hands balling up in my lapels, hauling me forward into the gritty yellow light spilling out the kitchen window. “He’s gonna get you killed!”

Denial swells in my chest until I can’t breathe, sharp and corrosive in my throat. I can’t think that way. There’s not an option for me to think that way, because admitting it will change nothing. We’ve made our mistakes, Marco and I, and both our hands are dirty now. And maybe the guilt’s shared unevenly, maybe my finger’s never been on a trigger that ended somebody’s life, but I am far from blameless. Coming back from that – from the thrill in my veins and the smell of cash and gunpowder and Marco’s skin under my fingertips – isn’t possible. To come back from sin, you have to atone, and I can’t.

I can be sorry for a lot of things, but not for Marco. Not for us.

I know that to Eren, it will be a lame excuse, a cop-out. And maybe it is. But it’s the reason I’ve stayed, the reason that I can’t even imagine anything else, the reason I shove Eren back along with all of the doubts I can’t afford to have. “He loves me!”

“SO DO I.” His voice cracks around the edges of the shout, ragged and lost, not nearly as angry as he’s trying to make it. Eren’s eyes go wide as the words echo across the dusty silence of the backyard, a hand coming up too-late over his mouth like he could pull them back.

My guts drop. “What?”

I know what. I know exactly what.

I’ve been a fool. All those years, all those things I should have seen.

(Eren with a big, toothy, bloodstained smile, sitting through his mother yelling about what a mess I’d made of his nose with a look that said he’d do it again, his fingers skirting over the scar years later whenever he had something to think about.)

His hand shakes as he peels it away from his lips, an uneven choking noise rattling in his lungs. For the smallest moment, I see him tense up, look to the side, his first instinct to run away – and I’ve never seen him run from anything.

 (Eren going out of his way when it came to being cruel to Marco, insisting that there was something about him that didn’t sit right.)

But then he looks at me, and there’s something in his eyes that’s not quite bravery. It’s more like resignation, like staring down the end and not being able to be at peace unless you give it one last try. This isn’t Eren. Eren doesn’t give up, not for anything, and certainly not for something as unworthy of him compromising himself as me.

_(“You got people here that need you, people here that lo-... We can’t watch you do this to yourself.”)_

It is him, though. It’s a look I’ve seen out of the corner of my eye and never given thought to. It’s his hands pressed to my alcohol-heated face as Marco’s first letter burned, the pleading strains of _let him go, let him go, let him go._ It’s everything that we never acknowledged, every could-have-been that’s been adding itself to the pile over the years, pulling him under.

I spent so much time feeling like I had an albatross around my neck, never stopped to think that maybe I _was_ the albatross. I’ve been the weight on his heart for God knows how long.

(Mikasa saying she didn’t love me as easily as saying that she didn’t care for a certain shade of blue, watching Eren from a distance and telling me that I didn’t need to understand why she’d stay with a man who didn’t have her heart.)

And the cruelty of it all is in the timing, really. The timing and the shitty state of the world. In another life, in an existence where we both hadn’t spent years sitting on secrets and accepting watered-down happiness and artificial fulfillment, I think I could have loved him. In a world where he was braver and I was braver and we both had it in us to chase something good even through the threat of something bad, we could have had something.

But this is not that world. This is a world where the two of us made mistakes and shoved things down that should have seen the sun long before we had to drag them out kicking and screaming. This is a world where Eren learned to accept a false contentment that I never could, a world where someone who was far braver than either of us held out a hand and said _come with me,_ and I grabbed on and haven’t let go since, never have any intention to let go as long as I still have the strength to hold on.

I won’t be sorry for who holds my love. The only thing I can find it in me to regret is that before him, I never had the chance to love and lose. I deserve that pain more than Eren does, and he’s standing in front of me, caving under the weight of it. Anything I do to try to ease his burden will only crush him more.

_(“He’s been my best friend since I was six years old.”_

_“You sure that’s it?”)_

Even Marco knew before I did. What does that say about me?

It says that I’ve been a fool. A blind, careless fool.

It should be more silent than it is, the sound of wind through dust and a few scattered crickets out of place in the vacuum of everything I should have known long before now. The air should be heavier than this, pressing down on me the way it looks like it’s pressing down on Eren. He seems so much smaller than seconds ago, arms curled around his chest like he’s trying to hold himself together. When he finds his words again, they’re the same ones, a wavering, whispered plea. “So do I.”

When we were kids, we spent so much time together that we reached a sort of synergy. After so many long summer afternoons playing in the cavernous halls of my house or the empty hayloft of his parents’ unused barn, an understanding was reached between us, a silent language that never went away. It never took words for us to say how we were feeling, to tell each other what we wanted.

I know what he wants from me. It’s there in the weary bow of his spine, in the way his fingers flex like he wants to reach for me before he wraps them tight around his own arms again. Eren doesn’t have to tell me what he wants.

And I don’t have to tell him that I can’t give it to him.

We’ve never needed words, but he _wants_ them, shaking where he stands and watching me with this expectation that I can’t hope to fulfill. I was used to not being enough for most of the people in my life. Letting Eren down is a new kind of pain, though, the kind that drops into the pit of my stomach and festers, spreads outward until I’m consumed by it, because there’s no way for me to make it better. To take away the visceral hurt in his eyes would be to make myself a liar, and while he may want me, he’s never wanted my pity or my deception.

“Say something.” His voice trembles, thick around the edges. The important things between us have existed in silence for so long, because they were easier when left there. Our wordless language and understandings built on implication have lasted us for years because they covered things that neither of us wanted to give a voice. But outside the sphere of us, Eren has always been loud, always faced down everything in life with brazen defiance and violent shouts. He’ll scream and rage against his losses until his lungs give out, but not until they’re given to him in something more concrete than me standing there with the dust swirling around my feet.

I look at him, and I wonder if this is what those dreams we always had of getting out amount to in the end. Burning your bridges so you have nowhere left to go but forward.

“Please.” There’s a hitch to the word that sears down to the marrow of my bones, and I’m glad that he’s standing in shadow so I don’t have to see the unshed tears behind it. “Just say _something,_ Jean. Goddammit, say _something._ ”

Headlights draw closer up the road, Marco bringing what looks like a newly-stolen Dodge to a halt in the shadows beyond the circle surrounding my front porch.

Say something. Of everything he’s asked me without putting it to words – to stay, to love him instead, to go back to everything I left behind – he chooses the simplest request as his last resort. Say something. And really, I owe him that much. I owe him closure.

I owe a lot of people a lot of things.

Say something. Say what? There’s nothing I can say that will make this better. Anything I could say would only serve to break him, add one more destruction to my rapidly growing ledger.

I don’t say anything. I pull in a razor-lined breath and walk past him, turning the corner at the front of my house. It’s like carving out part of my insides and trying to walk away with my head held high. Leaving a piece of who I am behind.

“Jean.” In twelve years, I’ve never seen Eren cry. I don’t turn around. Hearing it is bad enough.

I climb in the passenger side of the car, and Marco drives away, and I watch Eren’s silhouette in the rearview until he disappears. And I don’t say anything.

Anything I could say would only serve to break him. I won’t take responsibility for that, won’t own his broken heart or the crippling loss in his voice as I left him.

If Eren breaks himself, my hands are clean. I’ll cling to that thought in hopes that I’ll be able to sleep at night.

“You okay?” Marco asks a few minutes later, taking the road into town instead of heading North.

I shrug. I’m such a shitty liar where he’s concerned that he’d call me on it in a second if I tried.

“Everything go okay with your folks?”

“Mom cried. Nettie pitched a fit. They took the money, though.” The moon lights up the road in a pale, soft radiance, so much gentler than the storm raging inside my chest and against the backs of my teeth.

Marco picks up on my tension – its too much to hope that he would ignore it and leave me to my well-deserved misery – reaching over with one hand and rubbing at the nape of my neck. “I figured it’d play out like that. Was that Eren standing with you when I pulled up?”

Something in my stomach gives a violent twist. “Yeah.”

“What’d he want?”

More than I could give him. I don’t say anything.

Pursing his lips, Marco taps on the brakes a bit, slowing the car down as we drive through West Dallas and into the nicer part of town. “Picked up a new car.”

“I see that.”

“We’ve already had a fight, Jean,” he sighs, squinting out the windshield. “We’ll find somewhere to stay in Oklahoma tonight and you can be as pissy as you want with me then, but I got a job I wanna do before we head for the state line.”

“We’ve got sixteen hundred dollars in the trunk!” I protest, jerking a thumb over my shoulder and gawking at him. “After the day we’ve had, you _really_ want to do a job?”

“I got ahold of Annie,” he explains. “She’s the one who gave me the job. Don’t know what she wants me to do with it. Didn’t even give us a drop-off point. But she said that if we do the job, help will come. Kinda cryptic, but I’ll take it. I don’t know about you, but help sounds good right now.”

What sounds good right now is a warm bed and a bottle of whiskey and the freedom to sleep for three days straight. “What’s Annie doing givin’ you jobs in Dallas?”

“Hell if I know. Maybe she’s franchising. Either way, it’s an easy in, easy out, just a B and E.”

I give him a blank look.

“Breaking and Entering, darlin’.”

“Ah.”

The job ends up being a jewelry store downtown, lights off and doors locked. Marco waves me into the alley between the store and a big stone church, eyes narrowed as he squints at the long stretch of wall. “Well, shit.”

“What are you lookin’ for?” I ask him, checking the street for traffic and finding it thankfully empty.

“Cellar door. Like that job we did back in Houston. Saves us having to go in the front.”

But there’s no cellar door. The closest thing to an alternative entrance we could get are the windows of the apartments above the shop, but neither of us has running up walls in our skill sets. I can see Marco trying to work it out, gnawing on his bottom lip and tapping his fingers against the bricks. It’s the most relaxed I’ve seen him all day, back in his element, able to distract himself from everything that’s happened. I think back to Annie, to her lenience and seemingly unprecedented affection for Marco, and something tells me that we’re not doing this job for her benefit.

Everyone has something that they do to unwind from stress. Mom knits. I drink. Marco apparently commits grand larceny.

“Fuck me, we’re gonna have to use the front door,” he finally sighs, taking off his hat and rubbing a hand across his forehead. “It’s a jewelry store. Little stock, infrequent deliveries. There won’t be a service door. Everything comes in and out through the front.”

He leads me back around the front of the building, positioning me up against one of the windows and crouching down behind me. “Have a smoke.”

“What?”

“Light a cigarette, Jean, and for God’s sake, look casual.” Marco scowls and digs what looks like a wallet out of his pocket, flipping it open to reveal an impressive set of lockpicks. “Can’t break the glass; someone would hear or an alarm would go off. I gotta pick the lock, and I’m _shit_ at pickin’ locks, so you need to stand there and be my lookout. Tap your foot twice if you see someone coming.”

I stand there are do what he says, lighting up and watching the empty street with tension coiling in my stomach. I hate doubting him, but this feels like a recipe for disaster. _You’re doin’ eighty down a one-way road off a cliff_ _,_ Eren had said.

Thinking about Eren makes my chest hurt. I try to distract myself, roll the cigarette between my fingers and start whistling a Glenn Miller tune.

“Stop that,” Marco mutters behind me. “I’m tryin’ to concentrate.”

By the time he finally gets the lock to give, I’ve chewed so hard on the inside of my cheek that I taste blood. Grinding the smoke out under my shoe, I follow after him when he waves me forward, both of us holding our breaths as we emerge into a room of glass display cases, their contents glittering in the moonlight.

“Did she say what she wants us to get?” I whisper, keeping my voice low in case it carries up through the ceiling into the apartments above.

Marco shakes his head. “Think she just wants us to clean it out. She’ll probably fence the stuff later. Find a bag and hop to it.”

The display cases need a key to open them, but each one has a little key on a hook beneath it, probably kept on a shopkeeper’s person during the day. I slide open the first case I come across and start emptying it into a shopping bag from the front counter. Pearls, gold, rubies, things that my mother used to wear before she had to pawn all of it, every piece feeling rich in my hands before I dump it into the bag. I wonder how much Annie’s going to get for all of this, how big our cut will be. It seems a pittance compared to leaving a bank with twenty-five hundred dollars in tow, but I know better than to question Marco’s trust in her. That’s one of the few solid things he has anymore. I won’t take it from him.

 _Say something._ Silence and my own footsteps shaking my bones. I’ve taken enough from people. A funny thought to have as I’m moving onto a second display case, tossing emerald necklaces in a bag like costume jewelry.

“Hey, c’mere,” Marco calls from the other side of the store.

I duck under the line of sight from the front windows and shuffle over to where he’s been cleaning out a display of what looks like signet rings, holding one up with a grin. “Yup, s’what I thought.”

“Huh?”

“It matches your eyes,” he says, pointing to the big, gleaming citrine set into the top. I shouldn’t be feeling a warm rush of affection right now, but he takes advantage of the tender moment to throw the thing at my face, laughing when I flail to catch it and fall on my ass in the process. “Here. Take it.”

I look at the ring, then at him. “Marco…”

“Oh God, no, not like that!” He rushes out, and I could swear that I see his cheeks redden even in the limited light. “I just… You should have something, y’know. Something to look at when I do stupid shit and you wonder why you’re with me and if it’s worth it. And I don’t know if it’ll help, or if it’ll be enough. Maybe it won’t and someday you’ll get tired and walk out on me. But you take that. And the next time I fuck up, just look at it and remember that I love you.”

He doesn’t have to say it in so many words for me to know the intent. Marco doesn’t work in things as simple as straightforward apologies. He’s not one for swan songs and soft things, won’t bend under the weight of anyone else’s ideals.

But he loves me. At the end of the day and the end of the road and the end of all things, he loves me. I don’t need a wordless idea wrapped up in a band of gold for me to remember that. I remember it better in how his fingertips trace the planes of my face when he thinks I’m asleep, in his hand wrapped around mine going down an empty stretch of road, in the way he holds me like he’s constantly afraid I’ll slip away. He loves me, and that’s something I’d steal for. Something I’d kill for.

_He’s gonna get you killed!_

Something I’d die for, if it came down to it.

And I love him. He knows that. I’ve told him I don’t know how many times, and Marco isn’t the type to need reassurance, but I’ll give it to him anyway, written across the edges of my lips when I pull him down and kiss him hard, feel his heartbeat beneath my seeking hands and let it coat my skin like armor. Last night, he whispered promises that we would live forever. Here, with him, I’m starting to believe it.

He pulls away like it’s painful to do so, mapping out the lines where my neck slopes down to my shoulders. “Stay with me?”

“You ain’t gettin’ rid of me that easy,” I grin, trying to slip the ring on and laughing when it falls right back off. “It’s a little too big.”

“Here.” He pulls a thin gold chain out of the bag beside him, loops it through the ring and fastens it around my neck. “It’ll do.”

I nod, brushing my fingers over the facets of the citrine. “It’ll do.”

The front door opens.

 _“Shit.”_ Hand closing in a vice grip around my arm, Marco yanks me over behind the display case, pressing a hand over my mouth. My heart’s beating so loud that whoever just walked in is sure to hear it, pounding against my ribcage like it’s trying to escape.

I see the resolve in Marco’s eyes before anything else, watch him hold a finger to his lips in a shushing motion before he takes his other hand off my mouth and reaches for his waistband. He’s already killed one person today, and I saw the thinly-veiled toll that it took on him. What will two do?

“So.” A reedy tenor voice twangs over the top of the display case, too casual for standing in a burglarized jewelry store in the middle of the night. “A little Annie-bird told me that a certain sly old sonuvabitch was raisin’ hell in downtown Dallas tonight. I wonder, wherever could he be?”

Marco blinks, a mixture of something between confusion and hope on his face as his hand drifts away from his gun. “Connie?”

A guy’s head pokes over the top of the case, close-cropped hair and dark eyes and a shit-eating grin flashing upside-down from where I’m sitting. “How’s it goin’, brother?”

A moment of silence passes. And then Marco throws his head back and _laughs,_ hopping up and vaulting over the top of the case. By the time I get to my feet, he’s yanking the guy – who I now recognize as Connie Springer - into a tight, one-armed hug and giving him the noogie from hell with his free hand. “You dumbshit! I almost shot you!”

“That wouldn’t’ve been very nice of you,” Connie snorts, batting him off and stepping over to stick his hand out in my direction. “Been keeping him in line, Jean?”

“As best as anyone can,” I shrug, shaking his hand while silently thanking whatever power will listen that this didn’t turn into a bloodbath.

“What the hell are you doing here, man?” Marco asks him, picking up his bag of pilfered jewelry from the floor where he left it.

Connie just gives him that big, dopey smile again and snaps his suspenders against his chest. “I done got myself pardoned.”

“Because his _wife,_ ” a shrill soprano pipes up from the doorway, “wrote Lord knows how many impassioned letters about how Connie Springer’s a good, upstandin’ citizen who fell in with the wrong crowd and deserves another chance, one that he _won’t_ waste on the likes of Marco Bodt.”

Marco, Connie and I all look at each other and say in unison, “Oh shit.”

Sasha is _livid_ as she storms into the wreckage of the store, grabbing Connie by the ear like a misbehaving child and twisting until he yelps and starts pleading for mercy. “I couldn’t just leave him to the wolves, baby!”

“He _is_ a wolf. Or more accurately, a no-good, flea-bitten, trash-mongerin’ coyote, feedin’ off productive members of society,” she growls, her glare shifting from Marco to me.

I let out a nervous little laugh. “Evenin’, Mrs. Springer.”

“And _you._ ” She abandons Connie in favor of her new target, lunging at me and punctuating every word with a surprisingly hard swing of her purse at any area of my body she can land a hit on. “How. Dare. You. Jean. Kirschtein. Your. Mama. Has. Been. Worried. _Sick!_ ”

“I just went to see her!” I plead, like that will help my case, trying to duck behind Marco only to have him shake his head and step out of range. Sure, he loves me. Just not enough to get between me and Sasha Springer’s wrath.

“And I _know_ your folks raised you better than this! You are a nice boy, shouldn’t be runnin’ around makin’ trouble with rotten apples like this one over here; don’t know what he told you, but—“

“We’re fuckin’ on a regular basis, Sasha,” Marco drones almost boredly, inspecting one of the pocket watches he lifted from the display case.

Sasha stops mid-swing, a look of horrified realization dawning on her. “Oh.”

“Yeah, ‘oh.’ Oh… _fuck._ ” His retort gets cut off by the distant wail of sirens drawing closer from several blocks away. “Someone must have seen y’all come in. C’mon, I got the car outside.”

“That slick new Dodge?” Connie asks, peering out the window and falling in behind Marco’s hurried footsteps. “Nice.”

“No!” Sasha fumes, grabbing her husband by the back of his suspenders and hauling him back. “You are not gettin’ involved in this, Con, not after all of this.”

Marco turns around, pinching the bridge of his nose and looking like he’s trying very hard not to lose his patience. “Sasha, are you aware that you’re standin’ in the middle of a crime scene?”

She just glowers at him.

“Yes?” More silence. Marco darts behind her and Connie both and shoves them toward the door, grabbing another handful of trinkets as he goes. “Then I got bad news for you. You’re already involved, sugar. Now get your mouthy ass in the car unless you’d prefer prison over my company.”

We make it around the corner long before the police cars show up, far out of town with no pursuit before anyone says anything.

“Lord, forgive my husband, for he knows not what he does,” Sasha mutters in the back seat, pulling a pocket Bible out of her purse and clutching it to her chest.

“It true that you hit that bank up in Oklahoma the other day?” Connie asks, leaning up between Marco and I. “What kinda haul you pull in from that?”

“Twenty-five hundred,” I tell him.

“Jeeeeeeee _sus!_ ”

Sasha hits him upside the head and yells not to take the Lord’s name in vain. And we drive. And the moon shines bright on the open road.

And a few miles into Oklahoma, I look over at Marco, and he smiles.

That’s what I hold onto, what keeps me going toward the endless miles ahead and all the danger that haunts them. I can’t think of the world in the rearview mirror, of Mom and Nettie and Eren and everything else I left behind. If I think of them, it will undo me. This is what I have now, the hum of the engine beneath my feet and Marco’s smile. I reach up and brush my fingers over the ring resting against my sternum again. This is what I have.

It’ll do.


	19. Marco

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have a [tumblr](http://southspinner.tumblr.com)
> 
> Also I apologize for how goddamn dialogue-heavy this chapter is but there was A LOT OF PLOT STUFF to cover please forgive how shitty and transition-y this chapter is OTL

“Get your lazy ass up, Marco; you’re gonna blow your _wig_ when you see this!”

Connie has a lot of annoying little habits, but the one that makes me want to smack him the most is his proclivity for walking into rooms without knocking.  Three weeks on the road, and he’s walked in on Jean and I mid-fuck twice and mid-foreplay three times. This time, all he’s walking in on is the two of us cocooned in blankets on an abnormally chilly Kansas morning, deep in the hold of rare, blissful sleep.

And God knows sleep’s been hard to come by lately. I can’t close my eyes without seeing blood on pavement, can’t put my head to a pillow without gunshots ringing in my ears until I feel like my skull’s going to cave in from the rebound. There’s only so much moral stability you can gain by curling into yourself and whispering _it was him or me_ over and over again, and it’s not enough moral stability to get a good night’s sleep.

I never meant for anyone to die. My whole life, I’ve been in love with the glamour and the intrigue that’s supposed to come with being an outlaw. They never talked about the blood and guts and guilt in any of those movies I snuck into. There’s nothing to love in some poor bastard’s brains splattered all over his own driveway.

Jean’s joined me in my insomnia, too, although I can’t be sure if it’s from being fucked up over the murder in Missouri or from whatever happened when I left him alone back in Dallas. He doesn’t call home anymore, walks around with a sadness in him that wasn’t there before. And for whatever reason he’s got to feel like he can’t have peace, he always keeps me company on my sleepless nights. Restlessness has never sat well on my shoulders. Jean’s grown to be uncomfortable with it as well, and there’s few things like three in the morning in a silent motel room to make you feel like the world’s collapsing down on you.

So we distract ourselves. We play cards, we count the cash from the last job, we drink, we fuck, we do anything to get out of our own heads and stave off the feeling of something crawling under our skin until exhaustion takes us and we grab a few hours of fitful sleep in the wee hours of the morning. We always wake up feeling more tired than we were before.

And on a rare, blessed morning where we don’t have to wake up at the ass-crack of dawn to pack up and move on, Connie Springer decides to burst into our room at the motor court we’ve been occupying for the last two days, a newspaper in one hand and a sandwich in the other.

I sit up and squint at my watch before turning all my bleary-eyed, raspy-voiced wrath on Connie. “I’ve had one hour of sleep. It had better be the fuckin’ Rapture.”

“No, but you still wanna see this, man, I—“

“Shhh,” I hiss, whacking him once he gets close enough and nodding down at Jean, who murmurs something in his sleep and burrows down farther into the blankets. No need to wake him for whatever bullshit Connie’s got to discuss. “I’ll meet you outside, just gimme a minute.”

The fatigue must really be getting to Jean. Usually such a light sleeper, his breathing never stops its slow, even cadence as I roll carefully out of his arms and scoop yesterday’s clothes off the floor, dressing in a hurry and cursing as I try to find where my suspenders ended up. The only time he stirs is when I’m getting ready to walk out the door, a distressed little whimper rising up from his blanket-nest, one arm flopping around as his hand maps out the empty space in bed where I should be. All it takes to stop his tossing and turning is a pillow placed under the curve of his arm, a fleeting kiss on his forehead the cure for the worried furrow in his brow. Of anyone here, Jean deserves to rest easy the most. I shut the door with my breath held and hope it’s enough to give him that much.

Connie’s waiting outside, his shit-eating grin still in place. “What kept you up all night?”

“Three guesses,” I grumble, lighting a smoke and glaring at him. “What the hell’s important enough to make you come in there like a house afire?”

“This,” says Connie, shoving the newspaper under my nose.

 _BODT GANG STRIKES AGAIN,_ reads the headline, a long article about the string of banks and stores we did in Belton, Missouri last week. I curse under my breath and grab the paper from Connie, not caring so much about the article as I do the potential dangers attached to it. As much of a thrill as the first few front page write-ups were, as much as a part of me still gets an electric buzz seeing them, they’ve got the potential to pose a threat to the anonymity that makes it possible for us to hide out in hotels and motor courts and tourist parks. A fake name will get you far enough, but when someone attaches it to a face they know they’ve seen before, things get dicey.

Thankfully, it’s hard to match any of us up with the photographic evidence the press has been using. There aren’t any pictures of Sasha circulating, Connie and I are both fuzzy mug shots from Waco, and Jean is a faded relic from a high school yearbook, sixteen and scrawny and looking nothing like he does now. The people in charge of the motor court have only dealt with Sasha face-to-face, so if we keep to ourselves and stay inside, we should be able to spend one more day in Kansas.

“Your wife seen this yet?” I ask, skimming over the article again. “Heh, look at this. ‘The ladies at the scene of the Belton Banking and Trust robbery described Bodt as a handsome rogue who remained infallibly polite throughout the crime.’ You wanna break the bad news to the dames at the next job, or should I?”

“Just shove your tongue down Jean’s throat in the middle of the stick-up; that should get the message across,” he snorts, grabbing the paper back and taking a quick glance over his shoulder. “I don’t reckon Sasha’s seen anything. We’d’ve heard her screamin’ about it if she had.”

Any press release has a reliable cycle. One of us spots a write-up in the local paper, Sasha finds out, and then we’re all subjected to an hour or two of her begging Connie and the rest of us to just give up the ghost and go home and accept our penance. The only way to shut her up is to point out that she’ll be just as guilty in the eyes of the law as the rest of us and therefore be stuck in prison just as long, a fact that she meets with sulking and giving everyone dirty looks for the rest of the day. Sasha’s a self-righteous harpy, but apparently not so righteous that she’ll sacrifice her own freedom in the name of saving our sinning souls. I’ve never been so glad for her hypocrisy.

“That ain’t what I came to get you for, though,” Connie amends, flipping back a few pages to a different article. “I saw this and started thinkin’.”

“Careful, Connie, wouldn’t want to overexert yourself.”

“Fuck you,” he snaps without any real malice. The smile feels rusty and out-of-place on my lips, but it’s one of the reasons I’m glad to have him here, one small spot of levity in a situation that’s growing darker by the day.

It’s nothing. Or at least, my first instinct is to think that it’s nothing, a tiny scrap of a write-up in the bottom corner of the page, _Enid Armory Subject of National Guard Expansion._ Connie bounces on the balls of his feet, excited that _he’s_ the one waiting for _me_ to get it for once in his life.

“What’s the fuss about?” I frown, blowing a cloud of smoke out against the newsprint and watching the words fog, smeared by distortion and my own fatigue. I wonder how much sleep I could get before the nightmares hit if I were to go and crawl back in bed right now.

Connie jabs a finger into the headline. “There’s a National Guard Armory in Enid, Oklahoma.”

“No shit.”

“I asked for your attention, not your sass; don’t make me pop you in the mouth.” Grumbling, he folds the paper under his arm and hops up to sit on the whitewashed railing lining the pavement in front of the strip of rooms, feet swinging like a little kid sitting on a barstool. “An armory that’s gettin’ expanded. What’ll happen?”

“More troops, I reckon.” If Connie woke me up for the express purpose of giving me the urgent bulletin that we need to give Enid, Oklahoma a wide berth, I might have to kick his ass.

“And more troops means…”

“More commerce in the city? Hell if I know.”

“ _Weapons,_ Marco.” Rubbing his hands together, Connie gives me this manic, toothy grin that’s a little unsettling. “And not the pissant little peashooters we’ve been workin’ with. I’m talkin’ _big_ boomsticks, man. Automatic ones. They’ll be shipping ‘em in, ammunition, submachine guns, Thompsons, BARs…”

“Browning Automatic Rifles?” My interest is officially piqued.

“Makes sense that they’d have ‘em,” he shrugs, a spring in his step as he hops off the railing. “Think of what we could do with that kinda firepower.”

It’s probably offensive for me to laugh, judging by the look on Connie’s face when I burst into loud guffaws right in his face. The comedy is appreciated, though, my sides aching by the time I look back up at him and his childish pout. “Wait, you’re serious?”

“Don’t see why you get to be the sole brains of the operation.”

“This is ‘cause you’ve got sour grapes over them callin’ us the Bodt Gang, ain’t it?”

Connie crosses his arms and mutters something under his breath about how the Bodt Gang sounds like the name of a bad radio serial.

“And you wanna do an armory?” I scoff, shaking my head. “An honest-to-god _armory_. The kind with soldiers. Soldiers who have way bigger guns than we do.”

“Not the armory, you ass,” he snaps and takes a halfhearted swipe at me, which I dodge. “We head to Enid, case the place out, and figure out how to co-… command…”

“Commandeer?”

“Yeah! Do that to one of the transports! They gotta be gettin’ the guns in somehow.”

A month ago, I would have hopped on board in no time, the allure of a job that big and the fuss it would kick up enough to justify the risk. Now, it’s a little more complex. A job this big isn’t a grab-and-dash convenience store robbery. It’s days of casing the place out, careful planning, a high margin for error. It’s the sort of job that could turn bloody fast. We’d have no control over the situation, and I can’t trust myself to keep a level head in the state I’ve been in. We could use the guns. We could use the publicity. But none of us could use a new hole in the head.

I feel the ghost of a gun’s recoil in my wrist, smell blood over the greasy diner food and road dust that hangs in the air of the motor court. My stomach churns.

“It ain’t worth it.” Connie’s idea isn’t even good in theory, too much of a chance for something to go wrong no matter what way you spin it. My conscience is all but nonexistent, and it still won’t let me think that there could be a positive outcome.

“The hell it ain’t!” I’m too tired and off-balance to have this argument, but Connie keeps pushing. “Look, I know you’re a little edgy ‘cause of what happened in Missouri—“

“You don’t know shit—“

“But you’re forgettin’ the goal here!” Connie’s hands are balled up at his sides, crumpling the newspaper into a ruin. “You wanna make a name for yourself and get your boy North, right? You do that by doing bigger jobs.”

“There’s big jobs and then there’s _robbing the goddamn National Guard,_ Connie,” I groan.

“Look, all I’m sayin’ is that for bigger jobs, you need bigger guns. And the bigger the gun you got in your hand, the less likely you are to have to fire it. No one’s gonna get any heroic ideas standing on the business end of a BAR.”

The awful part is that he’s got a point. If we’ve reached the level where I can’t even make decisions for myself and Connie Springer’s doing detailed analysis of the human psyche, the world really is a fucked-up place. I squeeze my eyes shut against the morning sunshine and grind the heels of my hands into the sockets until bright spots of color dance in the darkness behind my eyelids, trying to orient myself in an existence that’s felt crooked for I don’t even remember how long. There’s no room for me to falter anymore. One mistake is as good as a death sentence, and if averting tragedy means taking all the fear and instability in me that cries out to be addressed and shoving it back, then so be it.

“We’ll run out there and case it,” I sigh, blinking away the last indecisive shadows that linger in the corners of my mind. “We’ll case it. That’s it. No promises.”

More and more, the architecture of this great plan that Jean and I thought up on a dizzy adrenaline high is starting to feel like it’s nothing more than us spinning our wheels. There are the newspaper articles, the small-town sensations, but it’s nothing close to household names or the reputation we’d need to carve out a niche anywhere outside the starved desperation of the Dust Bowl. Right now, we don’t have options. We have the road and the next job, the possibility of something that might be big enough to give us an advantage sitting in Enid, Oklahoma. Maybe that advantage is worth chasing. It’s not like we could have stayed in Kansas another night, anyway.

“That’s the spirit,” Connie grins, reaching up to clap me on the back. “I was startin’ to think you’d gone soft on me.”

“Not soft,” I shrug. Soft enough to not punch him for the accusation, but still enough of who I used to be to deny it. “I’ve just seen a lot of bad shit in the past year. I don’t have a mind to repeat any of it.”

His expression shifts to concern, the hand on my shoulder giving a soft squeeze. “I heard what happened back in July. That’s rough, brother. I mean, I’ve heard some real horror stories about Eastham, but—“

Everything in me goes cold, and I cut him off before he can bring those particular ghosts home to roost. “I don’t wanna talk about it.”

Connie blinks. “Jesus, you look like you’ve seen a ghost. What the hell aren’t you tellin’ me?”

“I said I don’t wanna talk about it, Connie.” I can’t. It has to stay down under the surface with everything else. I can’t afford for any of the things stewing in the dark places at the core of me to rear back up. They’ll incapacitate me if they do. It’s bad enough as-is, fighting off the nightmares and remembering that I don’t need to move with my back to the wall anymore, turning every loud noise to a gunshot in my subconscious, having to look twice every time I wash my hands because there are moments when I’m certain I can see the water running red. I’m enough of a mess without talking about it. Maybe there will come a day when I’ve got the luxury of breaking, but it’s not today.

I’ll let my dark places swallow me whole once I’m sitting in a hotel room in New York City. Until then, they can fester in the limited leeway of my dreams and more frightening thoughts. As long as I can keep a leash on my demons, then I can at least stay functional, and right now, functionality is synonymous with survival. I understand that. Connie understands that. And that’s why when I turn around and leave the conversation, he doesn’t try to stop me.

It doesn’t matter how bad your wounds are as long as you’re still on your feet and fighting. It’s when you go down that everything goes to shit.

Jean’s still sleeping when I get back to the room, a glimmer moving on the wall from where the sunlight reflects off the ring and golden chain cycling along with the slow rise and fall of his chest. Even through all the dark trapped in me, my songbird still sings for him, trills out something to the tune of _let him sleep a bit longer, just lie down and hold him for a while, don’t drag him into this just yet, let him have his peace._

I throw a blanket over its cage and remind myself that we don’t have time for tenderness even as I lean down and wake him up with a kiss brushed over his cheek, a reflexive smile against his skin as he stirs and mumbles something unintelligible. “C’mon, darlin’. Up and at ‘em.”

“Five more minutes.”

“We gotta go, Jean.”

“Hnk.” He cracks open one eye, bleary amber giving me a moment’s critical stare before he hooks an arm around my waist and tugs me down onto the mattress. I apparently don’t fit his cuddling criteria, though, because he nuzzles into my neck of all of a second before shoving me off with an affronted little noise, hiking the blankets up under his chin. “Ugh, you’re cold. You been outside?”

“Yeah. Connie found our next job and wanted to run it by me.” I reach under the blankets and settle my cold fingers in the warm valleys between his ribs. He squirms and whines, but when he looks at me, he stills. I might do well enough at hiding my shortcomings where Connie’s concerned, but Jean has always seen more than I wanted him to, frowns and kisses my forehead and braves my chilled hands until they find the steady anchor of his heartbeat humming up through his bones.

“You okay?” he whispers.

“I’m fine.” A lie, but we don’t have time for the uglier facets of the truth. “We just gotta get on the road soon if we’re gonna make it to Oklahoma in good time.”

Jean tilts his head. “What’s in Oklahoma?”

“A veritable smorgasbord of shit, most likely.” No use sugarcoating it.

“Mm. Sounds like fun,” he says through a sleepy smile.  “I’d be worried if things got too quiet.”

“Yeah.” I try to laugh. It comes out stilted and wrong. “We don’t do well with quiet.”

No, we sure as hell don’t.

* * *

Enid, Oklahoma isn’t the godforsaken scrap of a town I expect it to be, a busy main square and people crowding the streets despite the choking dust hovering in the air, kicked up by the passing cars. The town’s pulled in its fair share of business from the armory, it would seem, a beacon of life after miles upon miles of half-dead cities and empty, tired eyes behind the counter at every gas station. We roll in as the afternoon fades, making slow progress through the streets in efforts to get a read on Enid’s layout, the quickest routes out of town and North across the border back into Kansas. If we play our cards right, we shouldn’t need to use that information, but I’m not about to walk into this any more blind than I already am. The moment you assume you don’t need to know something is the moment your ignorance starts rearing back to bite you in the ass at the least convenient time.

“The lady back at the convenience store said that the armory’s outside of town if we just get to this street and keep going,” Jean mutters. He’s been driving since Tulsa, leaving me and Connie free to keep our eyes peeled for anything important. Endless stretches of barren land and abandoned houses, mostly. But the lack of disturbance only puts me more on-edge, something humming at the base of my skull that warns of impending disaster. Calm before a storm. Even though it’s the last thing I should be focusing on, my eyes keep flicking out to the horizon, watching for a duster to roll in. It would almost make me feel better if one did. At least then I’d have proof that the electric discontent in the air isn’t just a product of my own head.

“Streets are narrow. Grid’s tight.” Not a response, just a whispered stream of consciousness that hangs in the sweltering stillness of the Dodge’s cab as we head out towards the edge of town. “We gotta check and see if there’s a better way out. I don’t trust the main roads.”

“We can do that later,” says Connie from the back seat, squirming against the passenger side door. “I just wanna get outta this car.”

“I said we’d case the job, now let me case the damn job!”

“Since when is analyzing every speck of dust in the whole fuckin’ town casing a job?!”

“Both of you cool your engines,” Jean barks over the beginnings of the argument, a vein pulsing in his temple. “Christ, if I wanted to mediate children, I’d have stayed in Dallas to break up my sister’s fistfights.”

A stiff, uncomfortable quiet settles. I can practically hear Sasha pursing her lips.

“I don’t like this,” I say after another mile or so. “Something ain’t right. I don’t like this.”

“You’re still just shaky on your feet, is all.” Connie waves my concerns off like they’re nothing, and I’m equal parts grateful and infuriated by it. While he’s probably right, he could still do with a good smack and a stern reminder that my gut’s helped us avoid tighter spots than this. I don’t get the chance to deliver either, though, because Jean elbows me just as I’m turning around to take a jab at Connie and nods out the windshield.

“Look.”

The armory’s not much. One squat building surrounded by a rusty chain-link fence, the gate swung wide open. Too easy. There has to be a catch.

“Wow. Tight security,” Connie deadpans.

My eye twitches. Sucking in a deep breath through my nose, I try and fail to remain calm, grinding out, “We can walk right through the gate and still wind up very dead if every employee in the place is toting around an automatic rifle.”

“Baby, you know if I’m agreeing with Marco that the situation ain’t pretty,” Sasha implores, wringing her hands. “It’s too dangerous, Con; just chalk it up to a bad call and let’s get outta here.”

“Am I the only person in this vehicle that ain’t the living epitome of chicken-shit?” If Connie feels the weight of the combined glare he gets from me and his wife, he doesn’t say anything. “Jean, help me out, man.”

Jean sucks his bottom lip up between his teeth, shooting me a guilty look. “I don’t see the harm in at least givin’ the place a closer look.”

“Now _that’s_ the spirit!”

Jean keeps driving. Connie keeps chattering. Sasha starts praying under her breath. Left to my thoughts, I just sit there and try to will away the tension headache that’s roaring against the inside of my skull.

Oklahoma is flat and empty, which makes getting within observation distance of the armory harder than I’d anticipated. After another half-hour of cursing and snippy arguments, we settle on the strategy of parking the car behind the burnt-out shell of an abandoned barn about a quarter of a mile off the premises, slogging our way through dust-choked underbrush and a few scrappy, resilient trees clinging to life a stone’s throw away from the fence. Cramped, uncomfortable, and about as far from ideal as it could get, but the cover’s good enough to keep us from being spotted.

If Sasha could keep her mouth shut, that is.

“We are gonna get caught and _arrested,_ ” she chokes out from the other side of the tree trunk we’ve been using as a base of operations for about an hour. “They’re gonna haul us back to Dallas in chains, oh Lord, my poor mama’s gonna die of shame.”

“Yeah, it’s a shame you can’t do nothin’ to help prevent such a fate, like _being quiet,_ ” I hiss, glowering at her through the dark that’s blanketed the edge of town in inky stillness.

“Now you listen here, Marco Bodt—“

“No.”

Sasha shoots off on a whispered tirade of surprisingly colorful insults, and I tune out after Connie tries to calm her down and her rage turns on him. Jean reaches over from his place beside me and grabs my hand. “D’you see anything?”

“Patrols,” I nod, pointing at distant shadows moving around the fence’s perimeter, “but they’re timed like clockwork. Big gaps, twenty minutes or so. And the gate’s wide open, which means they’re expecting a delivery. If they get shipments in at night, that’s good for us, but we can’t do the job here. This is their turf. Gotta figure out which road the delivery trucks use and set it up there, before they get too close to the armory.”

“So you think we can swing it?”

Too soon to tell. I frown and give his hand a squeeze, bringing it up so that my lips brush in a contemplative murmur over his knuckles. “Maybe. Still some blank spaces I wanna fill in. And I still can’t shake this feeling I got that something ain’t right here.”

“Yeah, I feel it too,” says Jean, the already messy silhouette of his hair growing even wilder as he rakes a hand back through it. “S’weird. Almost feels like we’re not alone out here.”

Several yards to the right, a bush rustles. Everyone shuts up so fast that the resulting silence sucks at my mind like a vacuum.

“Did y’all hear that?” Connie gulps.

Sasha lets out this hysterical little laugh, rocking back on her heels and tugging at her hair. “It’s the police. This is it. I ain’t cut out for prison!”

“Ain’t no police officer that has any reason to be hiding in the bushes out back of a National Guard armory. Jean.” We don’t need words, just my sharp nod in the direction of the noise and a hand dropping to my hip for the revolver holstered there. He falls into step beside me, his own weapon in hand, both of our half-panicked breaths clashing in a ragged cacophony that almost drowns out the continued noises out in the foliage. In the diffused light from the armory mixed with whatever bit of moonlight dapples down through the dry tree branches, there’s a big, mostly-dead hydrangea bush quivering, too big to be a rabbit or a fox.

“What in the high holy hell?” Jean whispers.

The bush stops moving. Still cautious, Jean and I take a few steps closer.

“You gotta be _shittin’_ me,” the bush says. The branches rustle and shake, cracking under the onslaught of a burly frame rising from their depths.

“Oh, fuck _me_ ,” I groan.

“That ain’t my job anymore,” says Reiner Braun, brushing twigs out of his hair.

“Well, this just got way more complicated than anyone wanted.” Leaning up against the nearest tree, Jean shakes his head and pinches the bridge of his nose. “What are you doing here?”

“We’re casing out the armory, Tiny, what the hell’s it look like?”

_“We?”_

A few bushes over, a taller, ganglier shadow sheds its leafy cover. “You gotta be _shittin’_ me.”

I squint through the dark, not needing too much light to place the familiar voice and gait. “Bert? When did you get outta jail?”

“Out on parole,” he shrugs, drawing up beside Reiner and dusting off his shirt. “Though if I’d known you were actually gonna make it outta Waco, I might’ve gone with you last year. Looks like you’ve raised your share of hell since July, Bodt.”

“What in the _hell,_ ” says Connie, tromping over through the underbrush, “is going on over he-… Oh, you gotta be _shittin’_ me.”

“Gang’s all here, then,” Bert says, rolling his eyes.

Jean raises his hand uncertainly, like a little kid in a classroom. “I’m… confused?”

“Oh, shit, yeah.” Of course he is. Hell, _I’m_ more than a little confused, and certain that my confusion is only going to get worse. Might as well bring Jean up to speed before it does. “Okay, you remember Reiner; and Stretch over there is Bertholdt Hoover. He ended up in McLennan County with Connie and me after the shitshow in Waco, and apparently has since been released on parole. And the two of them are here because…”

“Same reason you are, I reckon,” Reiner sighs, looking like he’d like nothing more than a stiff drink and for someone else to hash all this shit out.

Well, fuck. “So you’re tellin’ me that Annie’s got her fingers in this.”

“Annie’s got a whole arm and a leg in this,” Bertholdt chimes in, crossing lanky arms over his chest. “Whatever’s coming into this place, she wants it bad. She pulled strings to get me out of the big house just for this job.”

“Not like someone who loves your skinny ass interceded with the Dragon Lady on your behalf,” Reiner grumbles.

He just smirks a little. “You’re too good to me, sugar.”

“Don’t you forget it.”

“So, we’re all here for the same haul,” says Connie, tapping a finger against his chin.

“No, Springer, _we_ are here for the haul,” says Reiner, “and _you_ are here to march your asses back out on the road. We’ve been casing this place for days. For lack of a better word, _dibs._ Now scram.”

“What in heaven’s name are y’all up to over here?” I slap a palm over my face and groan, but it doesn’t drown out Sasha’s approach, her footsteps drawing to a halt before she lets out a confused little _hmmm._ “Connie? Baby, what’s all this?”

“Uh… complicated?” He looks like he’s calculating the best direction to run from whatever wrath he’s about to incur. “But all you need to know is that we seem to be involved a territory dispute with some old friends, no one’s gettin’ shot tonight, and that you and I are the only two heterosexuals here.”

“…Oh.”

“Y’know,” Bert muses, looking over at Reiner with an oddly knowing expression. “The job aside, with everything that’s happened we should probably take ‘em to her…”

“Ohohoho _no,_ ” I laugh, taking a subconscious step back. The last thing I need, the absolute _last_ thing I need is Annie Leonhart mad at me for whatever reason. Grabbing Jean by the back of his vest, I start herding Connie and Sasha in the opposite direction, giving Reiner and Bertholdt a merry wave over my shoulder. “The haul’s yours. Y’all were here first, so we’ll just be on our way. I wish you boys the best of luck in your endeavors, but we will not be going to see Annie with you tonight.”

* * *

Annie’s sitting at a polished mahogany secretary desk when our ragtag band keys into her hotel room, silk dressing gown draped slightly open and hair loose around her shoulders, a cigarette in one hand and a martini in the other.

I start wondering what excruciating death she has in store for me. It’s reflexive, really.

“You’ve been keepin’ busy, Squirt,” she hums over the top of her glass.

“See, Annie, I can explain all of that—“ I’m silenced with a glare.

She puts out her smoke with a delicate flick of her wrist and rises gracefully from her chair, padding over in bare feet with all the destructive beauty of a hurricane rolling in over the ocean. I gulp, and she passes right by me, lips quirking into a feline smile as she rises up on tiptoe to kiss Jean on the cheek. “Jean, babydoll, you’re lookin’ well.”

“Thank you, Miss Leonhart, you as well,” he nods, polite to a fault as always.

“Flattery gets you everywhere, sugar.” A silken laugh, and then she turns to the rest of us, a coolly analytical up-and-down that takes in the entire situation in a second’s time. "See you boys picked up the present I left you at the jewelry store in Dallas. You never mentioned you were bringing the missus, Connie.”

“Well _someone_ has to be the voice of morality around here,” Sasha seethes, shoulders tensing.

Connie titters nervously, twining an arm around her waist. “Now, baby, Annie’s just being cordial.”

“She’s spunky. Knows how to keep a man in line. I like her.” A loaded, backhanded compliment if I’ve ever heard one, but even Sasha’s got enough of a sixth sense for danger that she doesn’t say anything, settling for a tight-lipped grimace that doesn’t soften as Annie glides over to the desk and starts fussing with a tray of crystal highball glasses and a decanter of whiskey. “I take it that the voice of morality doesn’t indulge, but would you boys like a drink?”

“Please,” says Jean.

“God, yes.” I’ll need booze to make it through this without having an aneurysm.

Connie opens his mouth like he’s going to accept, but withers under the look he gets from Sasha. “I’ll pass.”

Half my drink is gone in the time it takes Jean to get one sip down, but the slow wash of warmth spreading outwards across my limbs helps me relax a little, sitting down on the edge of the bed and pulling my hat off. “Look, I know you’re mad.”

“You ignored my advice, took stupid risks, killed a man, and took on jobs too big for you,” Annie drones, and I’m bracing myself for a lecture or something being thrown at my head. What I’m not bracing for is her ruffling my hair with a smirk, looking as close to fond as she can get. “And you’re all anyone’s talkin’ about. Proud of you, Squirt.”

“You’re… proud of me?” I gape. And it’s not that I’m dumbfounded by the moral juxtaposition in it, or that I think she’s lying. Annie’s committed enough murders of her own that the blood on my hands might as well be a drop in the ocean, and she doesn’t bullshit, not ever. What shakes me is that I’m sitting here, twenty years old with enough mental trauma for ten lifetimes and a criminal record that would make most God-fearing folks faint, and it’s the first time that someone’s been proud of me since I was six years old.

“No one ever got to the top following someone else’s orders. God knows I didn’t.”

“So this was what, a test?” I ask her, frowning into my drink. “I’m up Shit Creek without a paddle because you wanted to give me a nudge outta the nest?”

“It’s not a test.” Shaking her head, she sinks back into her chair and gives her martini a contemplative swirl. “I did have a contact, and he did get locked up. And if this is what you call Shit Creek… how much have you pulled in since you were in Dallas?”

“I don’t know exactly—“

“Four thousand, two hundred and twenty dollars,” says Jean. He always keeps a closer eye on the numbers than I do, obsessively rationing out a share for his folks.

Annie gestures at him like he’s made her point for her, kicking her heels up on the desk and making a point to ignore Sasha’s scandalized squawk when her robe slips up far enough to reveal the hem of her negligée. I roll my eyes. She’s just showboating at this point. “You’re doing better than you think, Marco. You’ve just gotta stop letting little snags trip you up—“

“I _killed_ someone.”

“Stop letting _little snags_ trip you up,” she reiterates. “And spare me the guilty conscience. Morality looks stuffy on everyone, ‘specially you, and tryin’ to play the folk hero’ll get you killed faster than any job you could do.”

She’s not wrong. Our closest brushes have come as a result of me tying my emotions too closely to the task at hand. I know it, and Annie knows it, lets that knowledge sit on the rim of her glass and play out across her carmine-stained lips as they curve into a self-assured grin.

“I’ll let you in on the armory job, if you want. We could use the extra pairs of hands.” Of course she could, and something tells me that we didn’t end up in this particular town on this particular day by any accident. Annie has always been a puppetmaster, and I was an idealistic fool to believe that I’d gotten out of her influence the moment Jean and I pulled out of Houston. I can feel the strings tugging at my wrists even now, little marionette limbs rattling back to Connie’s odd insistence about Enid at the motor court this morning, even further, back to the clandestine meeting at the jewelry store in Dallas.

I shoot a look over at Connie, who gives the tiniest uncomfortable squirm before he covers again. Bullshit, Sasha’s impassioned letters got him out of jail. Months and miles down the road, and I’ve never stopped being Annie’s errand boy.

“I bet you could,” I hum, choosing my words carefully. Outright anger won’t get me anywhere but dead. This is a game of diplomacy, something I’ve never been too skilled at, but I’ve seen enough of it to know that the honor among thieves only extends as far as the courtesy among them does. “Your terms?”

“I get my pick and y’all get the leftovers.”

“No deal.” Dangerous, too dangerous, but Annie won’t budge unless I push her a little. If she really needs the help, she’ll give. “I don’t even know what kinda haul it’d be. I ain’t puttin’ my ass and Jean’s ass on the line for table scraps.”

“What about my ass?” Connie pouts.

“ _Your_ ass is gonna have my boot in it when this is all over,” I growl. He’s got enough sense to shut up.

“Your haul is gonna be several _thousand_ dollars worth of artillery and ammunition, most of it automatic,” says Annie, examining her nails. “We don’t have specifics, but the boys have been watching them unload supplies for a few nights now. Bertl, be a doll and debrief them.”

“They run the supply trucks in through a back road at night,” Bertholdt explains, grabbing a piece of hotel stationary and sketching out a rough map. “Tryin’ to keep the public from gettin’ too nosy. Every load we’ve watched ‘em bring in has had crates of ammo, Thompsons, BARs, you name it. The road’s an easy ambush, too. There’s a hairpin turn right here that we can block off.”

“So if this is such an easy job, why do you need us?” Jean asks, ever perceptive. It’s good to know that I’m not the only one who smells a rat in all of this, his movements tense and flighty as he walks over to get a better look at Bert’s map.

“It ain’t a two-man job,” Reiner shrugs, leaning against the doorframe. “Those trucks each have a driver in the front and an armed guard in the back. At the very least, we need one guy manning the roadblock, one to keep a gun on the driver, one to keep a gun on the guard, one to clean out the goods, and a lookout. That adds up to—“

“Five.” Jean has gone very pale in the last few seconds, looking around the room with the same thought that hits me like a punch to the gut. Me. Jean. Connie. Reiner. Bertholdt.

“You planned this. Even then.” Annie doesn’t even bother denying it, meeting my accusation with a wry little quirk of her lips.

“I tried to get you to stay in Houston, Squirt.”

“Your contact—“

“Got locked up months before you ever came to see me.”

“You _lied_ to me.” It hurts more than it should. The first thing you learn when you start operating on the shady side of the law is that everyone lies, everyone schemes. Annie has never been an exception.

Deep down, I always knew that it was a bad idea to place my unwavering trust in a woman who built a criminal empire to rival any Northern mob boss with nothing but a good sense for business and her own bloodied hands. But there was something in her that sixteen-year-old me needed, battered and abandoned, left for dead until she picked me up and dusted me off and put a gun in my hand. I was foolish enough back then to believe that she did it because it was just what Annie did, picking up the kids that the world forgot and giving them a hope of something better. The truth is something a lot nastier that twenty-year-old me wishes he couldn’t see.

There’s no better way to guarantee yourself loyal underlings than dressing yourself up as a mother and a savior, making them think that everything you do is with their best interests at heart.

“I need this haul, Marco,” she says, so rational that I almost wish she would break into peals of maniacal laughter, rub her hands together in wicked glee, something that could help me see her as the bad guy in this. But she doesn’t. She just sits there with her drink, watching me with something that almost looks like regret. “You saw the state the storeroom was in, and it’s only gotten worse since you left. None of my runners are worth their salt, my market’s at a standstill, and if I don’t do something fast it’ll all cave in on top of me. Unarmed, I’m nothing. I need this haul. And I need my boys to get it for me. This ain’t something I’d trust to anyone but my dream team.”

“So you manipulated me into doing your dirty work for you.” A pointless accusation, really. We’re all part of the same big game, and everyone plays everyone. It’s one of the rules.

“I figured you’d spin your wheels for a while and then give up and come back to Houston,” Annie says, setting her glass on the desk with a delicate clink. “I didn’t expect you to light half the goddamn South on fire. I’m all for you spreadin’ your wings, kid. You’re a big boy now, but that don’t change the fact that I still need this haul.”

“And here I was dumb enough to think you were on my side,” I laugh, the sound bitter on the back of my tongue.

“I’m on _my_ side!” Eyes narrowed to dangerous slashes of icy blue, Annie gets up and storms over to where I’m still sitting on the bed, fisting a hand in the front of my shirt. “And I ain’t gonna compromise my plans. Not for you, not for _anyone,_ you hear me!? You got a rough lesson comin’, boy, and it’s that you gotta be on your own side. ‘Cause people like you and me, Marco, the world ain’t ever gonna be on ours. Took me emptying a shotgun into my piece-of-shit husband for me to learn it. I don’t know what it’ll take to get it through your thick skull.”

The room goes quiet, everyone wound tight as they wait for the penny to drop, for me to lash back, for Annie to pull out the gun we all know she’s got under her robe and put a bullet right between my eyes.

You’ve got to be on your own side.

“We’ll do the job,” I tell her, as evenly as I can with her rage this close. “But not for your leftovers. I want an offer. I obviously gotta look out for myself here. You can’t fault me for asking that much.”

Annie stares me down for another long moment, mulling it over. Her hand loosens in my shirt, and she steps back, pulling herself together and patting her hair back into place. “Fair enough. Three BARs and one of the Tommy guns, and ammunition for each.”

“I want two Tommy guns.”

“You get my first offer, and I’ve got information.”

It’s enough to make me pause, frowning at her as I get to my feet. “What kind of information?”

“The kind you want,” Annie shrugs, her posture ramrod-straight, not giving a bit. “Now do we have a deal or not, Squirt?”

I’ll curse myself for it later. I reach out and shake her hand anyway. “Fine. But you babysit Sasha while we’re gone.”

Sasha makes her opinion known by way of an indignant screech, and Annie laughs. “I’m sure we’ll have loads of fun. Now, you boys really oughta get on the road.”

Jean tries to rub the tension out of my shoulders as we walk out of the hotel, but I shrug him off, climbing in the driver’s seat of the Dodge and peeling out into the street behind Bert and Reiner’s Packard.

Connie shifts around in the back seat. “So, uh…”

“Y’know, if you’d told me the truth, I would’ve still come here,” I cut him off, voice flat.

“I couldn’t be sure of that!” he protests. “Look, all I was told is that we needed to come do this job. I didn’t know what would happen if I didn’t get you here, what she’d do… I had Sasha to think of, man, you can’t fault me.”

“No, I can’t.” I shake my head, watching the road dissolve into darkness beyond the yellow circles cast by our headlights. I know what it’s like now, having to make decisions with the interests of the one I love in mind, but I also know what it’s like to feel betrayal stinging at my insides like acid. “But I can’t trust you, either.”

I’ve relied on Connie to have my back since we were kids, and maybe that wasn’t my smartest idea, but losing that trust still hurts. I grit my teeth against the ache of it and drive, telling myself that there’s no use mourning something I’ll never get back.

I have to be on my own side.

The delivery route is a narrow dirt road that’s more than effectively blocked off by the Dodge parked across it, the hood up and Connie doing an absolutely abysmal job pretending he’s the victim of an unfortunate breakdown. I’m half-tempted to stomp out of the bushes where Jean and I are hiding and yell at him to stop trying to win an Academy Award and just fucking do his job, but the supply truck is due any minute, and I’m not willing to risk Annie’s wrath for the job getting thrown for the sake of Connie’s shitty acting.

“Are you okay?” Jean whispers, reaching over to grab my hand.

“I’ll be better when this is all over,” I grumble, checking the sights on my .45.  “We’re gonna take a nice, long vacation after this. Louisiana, maybe. Go spend a week in the Bayou, far, far away from people and all their bullshit.”

He hums his assent, leaning in and pressing a soft kiss to my temple. “You’re mad at Annie, aren’t you?”

“Not really. Annie looks out for Annie. I’m just mad that I fell for it. Eyes on the prize, though, darlin’. We all need to be sharp for this.”

We set the whole thing up an hour ago, but no amount of preparation ever really gets you ready for the real thing. The truck will roll up to where Connie’s parked in the road, and ideally, the driver will get out to help him. If that happens, Connie pulls a gun on the driver. If not, then Reiner comes out of the bushes across the road with a gun, holds it on him while Jean and I move around the back of the truck. I take care of the guard, Jean gets our haul and loads up the Dodge while Bertholdt makes sure no one’s coming, and we drive like hell. A good plan, assuming shit doesn’t go sideways. And when in the recent past has shit _not_ gone sideways?

“Here it comes.” Jean nods towards the bright speck of headlights rounding the corner hand tightening around mine.

“Hey.” I can feel the hitch in his breath, the panic shooting under his skin, echoed by a ghost of my own that I refuse to let affect me. “Hey, look at me.”

My problem is that I can’t be like Annie. I can’t be on my own side and stick solely to that, not anymore. Jean is natural to me now, something I can’t give up any more than I could just decide to stop breathing. I’ve been doomed since the day I realized that my every heartbeat had his name written all over it. I might have a hope if I could find it in me to fight against that, but I lost that war a long time ago, waved a white flag in the form of rustling bed sheets in innumerable motels and the glimmer of gold and citrine in a darkened Dallas storefront. There’s no going back. Not from him. And even if I could…

Well, I couldn’t. That’s the end of it. Doing anything other than loving him with all of my crooked heart is no longer a choice I have.

He turns his head, and I kiss him long and slow, hunkered down in the dried remains of a land that doesn’t have the fight in it that we have in us. And over the crunch of approaching tires, I whisper, “I love you.”

That’s whose side I’m on. There’s no my side or his side anymore. I’m on our side.

The first stroke of providence comes in the truck driver actually hopping out to check on Connie. And while he might not be the best actor in the world, Connie’s steady with a gun, has the guy up against the side of the car with Reiner running out for backup within ten seconds after he steps out of the cab.

“Okay, let’s go,” I nod, darting out of my hiding place and dragging Jean along after me. There are no windows in the back of the truck, so I knock on the back door and start begging fate to cut me a break.

“The engine die again?” The guard’s either a trusting one or a stupid one – haven’t I learned that those two are synonymous yet – swinging the door wide. “These pieces of shit ain’t gonna last until – hng!”

I try really, really hard to ignore the BAR strapped to his back when I sucker-punch him and drag him out of the truck, getting him on the ground with a pistol to his head before I look up at Jean. “Go!”

For as skinny as he is, he can haul a surprising amount of weight in a crisis, moving load after load out of the truck and into the back of the Dodge. We can’t take everything – and this particular delivery has its fair stare of uniforms and things other than weapons, anyway – but I keep count of what Jean manages to fit in the car. Two crates of ammo, a stack of seven or eight automatic rifles, and a wooden box stamped with _‘THOMPSON’_ that’s about as big as he is. The whole affair takes maybe six minutes, lots of cursing from my captive, and a good deal of sweat soaking Jean’s shirt when he runs back over with wide eyes.

“We’re good,” he wheezes. “Car’s started, but I don’t know when the next truck’s due. We need to make tracks.”

“All right, buddy, up you go.” I snatch the guard’s rifle and hand it off to Jean before hauling the guy to his feet, the gun barrel pressed to his spinal column enough incentive to herd him into the back of the truck again.

He turns around just as I’m reaching for the door, eyes wide when they fall on Jean and me. “Holy Mother, you two are…”

“Always nice to meet a fan,” Jean grins, twirling his Colt revolver around his finger by the trigger guard. “No time for autographs, unfortunately. You have a nice evening.”

We slam the door of the truck shut, winding a length of rope from one of the broken crates around the catch to keep the guard shut in until the next delivery rolls through. Connie’s yelling something about no room in the back seat by the time we make it back to the car, his arm sticking out the window at an awkward angle. Reiner’s still got a gun on the truck driver, not even glancing over at us.

“You and Bert good with us taking the haul back?” I ask, holstering my gun and yanking the door open.

“Yeah. We’ve been told we’re on cleanup duty anyway. Drive fast, Bodt.”

I grimace and climb in the car, slamming on the gas as soon as Jean’s in his seat.

“What did he mean by ‘cleanup duty?’” he asks.

A single gunshot behind us answers for me. Jean goes pale.

“Annie doesn’t like loose ends,” I mutter, speeding back out to the main road and praying that we all won’t end up one more loose end she decides to snip before this is all over.

We leave Connie with the car when we get back to the hotel to wait for Bert and Reiner and transfer their share of the haul over to the Packard. Jean and I look an absolute mess, sweaty and covered in dirt, but there’s no one in the lobby at this hour to question us, our progress up the stairs to Annie’s room uninterrupted.

“Did you get it?” She asks the second she opens the door, ushering us inside with hungry eyes and rushed movement.

Jean nods, collapsing onto the bed, dirtying the pristine white blankets. Annie pays him no mind, looking at me instead as I launch into a more detailed report. “Not as much ammo as I thought. Got two crates, and I want one of ‘em. Eight of the BARs, and I think Jean managed to haul out a whole box of Tommy guns. No pursuit. Bert and Reiner were back there cleaning up when we left.”

Annie’s face splits into a frightening, feral grin, her cool, smooth palms darting up to rest against my cheeks. “Good. _Good,_ Marco, this is _great_ news.”

The door swings open again, Bertholdt and Reiner walking in with Connie in tow. The deal’s officially over.

Well, almost.

“You said you had information.” I want to get it and get the hell out. The more distance I put between us and Annie’s agenda, the better.

“Oh, that,” she shrugs, sidestepping Connie and Sasha’s emotional reunion with an expression of vague disgust and lifting an expensive-looking leather valise up onto the bed. “This came my way not too long ago. I figured you’d want to see it.”

At first, I don’t understand what’s so special about the neatly folded newspaper she hands me. But then it hits me, a slow, growing pressure behind my sternum that builds in my throat and _explodes,_ loud peals of laughter bouncing of the walls of the hotel room.

“Marco, what in God’s name…” Jean mutters, getting up and prying the newspaper from my hands. I can’t stop laughing. “It’s a front page write-up from a month ago; we’ve had dozens of ‘em. What are you blowin’ your wig over?”

“Do you…” I wheeze, tears of mirth pricking at the corner of my eyes. Snatching the paper back, I take one look at it and start cackling again. “D’you know what this is?”

“A newspaper?” he ventures.

“It’s the _Ennis Daily News,_ ” I howl, slapping at my knee and trying to stave off the ache in my stomach.

“Which is?”

When I finally compose myself, my smile is twice as feral as Annie’s, three times as vicious, four times as self-satisfied. “It’s the newspaper they get in Telico.”

Victory _roars_ in my chest. Years of festering anger and the promise of vengeance in the best way I knew how, and it’s finally sitting here in my hand, my face, my _name,_ in black and white. Undeniable. They had to sit there and look at me smirking up at them from the front page.

_Our son is dead._

The hell he is. I lived. I’m not sorry.

In this moment, all the money, all the glamour and intrigue and the look of recognition on the guard’s face right before we shut him up in the back of his own truck, none of it means a damn thing. I can’t even think of it, not over the rush that fills me up and takes me over, a visceral satisfaction that bubbles up without an outlet until I grab Jean and kiss him hard enough to bruise, laughing against his lips. I’m alive. I’m here. I exist in spite of every effort my parents made to erase me, and I can almost smell their acrid bitterness rolling off the newsprint. Have fun explaining that headstone with my name on it to everyone in town now, Ma and Pa. Have fun telling them all the truth you would rather have buried your son than admitted.

“Well, shit,” Connie mumbles, scratching at the back of his head. “That explains it.”

“Explains what?” Jean asks him.

“Well, I… Marco, don’t be mad.”

“Brother, there is nothing you could say to me that would make me mad at this point,” I laugh, still fixed on the headline, still imagining the look on their faces.

“Well, after I got outta jail, I reckoned it was time to get right with my folks, went back to Telico to see my sister. And I went by your place…”

That pulls me out of my head rush quick enough. “I retract my earlier statement about not being mad. What the _fuck_ , Connie?”

“I didn’t go in!” He rushes out, hands up in a defensive stance. "I was halfway up to the house and heard someone yellin’. Man, someone was raisin’ hell in there, and I thought to myself, better not to pry.”

“That would’ve been after this paper came out. ‘Course there’d be a fight,” I nod, looking back at the date under the article title.

Jean frowns and says, “Wait, why would there be a fight?”

Connie blinks. “Did you not tell him, Marco?”

“He didn’t need to know.”

“What didn’t I need to know?!”

“That when my folks found out I was queer my old man beat me half to death, put me out on the street, and told everyone I knew that I’d died in a farm equipment accident!” I snap, the admission scraping like a razor over my tongue.

Silence blankets the room, heavy and thick with pity I never wanted from anyone. Sasha claps a hand over her mouth. Bertholdt grimaces and reaches for Reiner’s hand. Annie sits down beside me and gently touches my back and whispers, “Oh, honey.”

And Jean just stands there, horror progressing so slowly across his face that I can map the points of it. The gape of his mouth as he realizes why I never talked much about my family. The clench of his fists when he remembers all the shit he talked to me about how irresponsible I was for running away. The utter _hurt_ in his eyes when he thinks back to the nights he’s spent with careful fingers mapping out highways and landscapes in the scars across my back.

“You said you got caught under a tractor,” he says, his voice a trembling whisper.

“Yeah. That’s what they told everyone.” Marco got caught under a tractor. Poor boy was too mangled for a wake. A box full of dirt to simulate the weight of my body stuck under a rock with my name on it. Maura cried like the world was ending, Connie said. Cried like the world was ending over an empty grave.

Jean doesn’t say anything, just settles slowly down on the opposite side of me from Annie and takes one of my hands in both of his, shock and terror still etched into every inch of him. I know what he’s thinking. He’s imagining what could have happened if the wrong person had said something back in Dallas, if Eren had been vindictive enough to shout it from the rooftops. He’s picturing Nettie crying over a meaningless headstone and his mother not loving him enough to accept the things she couldn’t understand. And this is why I never told him. He was better off not knowing what being who you are can demand in return.

“But yeah, it sounded like a fight,” Connie continues after a beat, “so I figured I’d best be on my way. And as I was walkin’ off, I saw this brand spankin’ new Model A Ford sitting out front of the house.”

“So what?” I shrug. “It was probably Martin. He makes enough money to drive something like that.”

“No, see, that’s what I thought, but it couldn’t have been Martin. The car had Illinois tags on it.”

“Illinois tags? Who…” I trail off, mulling it over until the deduction clarifies in my head and I look over at Connie, my eyes widening. _“Shit.”_

“Yeah, and I wondered…” he starts, apparently reaching the same conclusion after a moment, his jaw dropping slightly. “No. No way. You really think?”

“Michael,” I groan, tossing the paper down on the bed with a whispered curse. “No one else it could be.”

“What the hell would Michael be doing back in Texas?”

“You know _exactly_ what the hell Michael’s doing back in Texas.” Irritation biting at my restless limbs, I shake off Jean and Annie and get to my feet, snatching the newspaper again. “Being a piece of shit aside, he knows a potential profit when he sees one. The bastard wants in on it. And if he thinks that I’m gonna give him the time of day after the shit he pulled, I’ll—“

“Wait, I’m confused,” says Jean. “Michael?”

“The brother that’s a salesman,” I explain, starting to pace. “And a slimy sonuvabitch that’ll fuck you over as soon as look at you, for the record. Haven’t heard tell of him being anywhere near Texas since I was fifteen. If he’s back, it ain’t good for anyone.”

“Well, devil’s advocate, but he sure sounded like he was jumpin’ down your folks’ throats on your behalf,” says Connie, walking over to stand beside me.

Annie gives me this weird, knowing look and hums, “You know, you could use all the people in your corner that you can get, Squirt.”

“Yeah, I’m takin’ that with a grain of salt coming from the woman who manipulated me across five states for a handful of guns.”

“I’m just sayin’,” she shrugs. “Anyway, I hope you boys do well with your share of the haul. I’d hit Kansas City, if I were you. Big, close to the state line. You could do banks there no problem.”

“I know how to pick my jobs,” I grumble, petulant.

“I know you do,” she smirks, brushing a kiss across my cheek before doing the same to Jean. “You take care. I’ll keep an eye out for you.”

The silence in the car is almost oppressive for the first hour after we pull out of Enid, everyone lost in their respective thoughts. Jean keeps looking at me like he’s afraid I might break, the weight of his pity so staggering that I can barely manage to sit up straight. Sasha’s in her same pissy silence as usual, and even Connie seems pensive for once, staring out the window at the gray sky of almost-morning with his fingers drumming on the door handle.

It’s a quiet I’m grateful for, though, one that leaves me some measure of peace to sort through the rabble in my head, to process all the new information I have and rationalize it, applying it to the situation at hand and…

“Shit,” I say just after we cross the border into Kansas. “Who gave Annie that newspaper?”


	20. Jean

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WOW, HELLO. SORRY THIS TOOK FOREVER. AS AN APOLOGY, HAVE A _FUCKING MASSIVE ALMOST 14K CHAPTER. JESUS._ This episode, Gays On The Beach (gotta love those ch20 beach episodes eh [theprophetlemonade](http://theprophetlemonade.tumblr.com)? Please don't sue me for plagiarism), philosophy and mild blasphemy courtesy of Marco Bodt, Erwin as Chuck Norris in a previous life, and Jean making the literal stupidest mistake of his entire existence.
> 
> As reference for the photo scene, you should check out these photos of the real Bonnie and Clyde that I based the scene off of.[This](http://s9.postimg.org/hbsvuv53j/640px_Bonnieclyde_f.jpg) is the first one, [here's](http://s8.postimg.org/dsb4msfjp/bonnie_and_clyde_with_gun.jpg) the second, and [the third.](http://s16.postimg.org/u3721d77p/Bonnie_Parker_Cigar1933.jpg)
> 
> I have a [tumblr.](http://southspinner.tumblr.com)

Time does funny things when you’re on the run. Without roots, without a sense of permanence, everything either compresses or stretches out. There are hours on the road that feel like days, stolen moments on quiet mornings that are gone too soon, slipping through your fingers like trying to hold onto rays of light, and if you’re not careful, the constant transience can start to feel like home. There’s only comfort in the world disappearing in the rearview mirror, and staying in one place for too long becomes stagnancy.

But sometimes, stagnancy is something good, a still place to shove the rabbit-hearted restlessness until you’ve found your even footing again.

Marco makes good on his promise of a vacation in Louisiana, driving in a long, roundabout loop that skirts state borders until we get to the Cajun Riviera and rent a nice little bungalow on the shore for an indefinite amount of time. We pay the resort owner extra to not ask questions, and it seems to work out well enough, the days passing in minutes or centuries, time skipping and dragging like it’s just one more thing off-balance in a disjointed world.

I’d never seen the ocean before coming here. The first sight of it is overwhelming, all that blue stretching out to meet the endless sky, giving way to days spent looking out the window when I’m not out on the beach just taking it all in, watching the waves rise and rush along the shore. The state of the economy doesn’t leave too much room for vacations, and the high winds and lingering foul weather of early spring mark an off season for the local beaches, or so we were told when we checked in. Ideal conditions for us.

Connie and Sasha keep to themselves inside the house for the most part, but Marco and I spend days wandering the abandoned shoreline, mapping out the broad curve of the coast. We hold hands in broad daylight just for the thrill of it, knowing that there’s no one there to see, laugh and holler like fools out at the gray horizon. He’s more at peace here than I’ve seen him in ages, the light-heartedness I fell in love with back in his smile, the ever-present tension in his shoulders unwinding day by day, and that alone is worth the diversion from all our careful plans.

The bungalow has two cozy bedrooms, and ours faces the shore. We fall asleep every night to the sound of the ocean on the sand, and after the first few nights, Marco no longer wakes up from his nightmares with ragged breaths and panicked eyes. That alone is enough to make me never ask how long he plans to stay.

March dies and April begins in the same stretch of stormy cycles of the tide. I turn nineteen on a gray, quiet Sunday, and I don’t say anything about it to anyone.

For the past few years, my birthday hasn’t been any cause for celebration. I’ve grown so used to the haunted look Mom gets during this time of year that downplaying it is second nature. Easier for my family, easier for me. It only takes one day of horror and the world falling down around you to ruin sixteen years’ worth of happy memories.

The last two day-after-birthdays, I’ve woken up with the ghost of a gunshot and my mother’s screams ringing in my ears. Maybe I’m older and wiser now, or maybe nineteen just comes with the experience of having seen worse, but this year’s a little easier. This year, I wake up to the mournful call of seagulls and the crashing of waves hitting the beach, to a smell that’s half Marco and half clean linen lingering on the sheets, to bright, warm rays of sunshine slanting down through the window across the blankets.

Before we came here, it had been years since I’d seen proper rain. I’d sat out on the porch and watched the storms roll in over the ocean with a sense of wonder that felt almost like sadness. It’s a little easier to process how I feel when it comes to the first nice weather we’ve had since we arrived. With a sleepy half-smile, I roll over to kiss Marco good morning, met with an empty side of the bed. I don’t panic the way I used to, flopping back on the pillows with a sigh. The blankets on his side are made up, the clothes he threw on the floor last night folded and tucked into one of his suitcases. He didn’t leave in a hurry, so I don’t bother getting up in one.

The house is quiet, but by the time I finish shaving and getting dressed I can smell breakfast cooking, wafting back the hall from the kitchen. Sasha stands alone over the stove, hissing something under her breath about the substandard cookware that came with the rental property and attacking a bowl of sausage gravy with a whisk like it’s done her a great personal injustice. She looks as put-together as ever, apron tied in a neat little bow at the small of her back and the seams of her shirtwaist dress somehow perfectly pressed even though we’re miles and weeks from the last ironing board I saw. But there’s a moment of brokenness in her that’s written across her face before she sees me hovering in the doorway, a tremor in her hands as she puts the bowl on the counter and a twitch that’s a little too violent to just be surprise when she turns around and sees me, pressing a hand to her chest. “Landsakes, Jean, you scared the life outta me. Can you be a doll and set the table? Breakfast’s almost done.”

“Where are Marco and Connie?” I ask, taking a stack of chipped plates down out of the cupboard and setting four places around the spindle-legged table at the center of the kitchen.

Sasha purses her lips for a moment, sliding a pan of biscuits out of the oven and knocking the door shut with her hip. “Outside fiddling around with some contraption they found in the coat closet. Marco said to let you sleep.”

Her hands are shaking again, dainty fingers trembling as she slides them out of the worn oven mitt and flings it back into a drawer that slams shut on its rickety track. Sasha’s always moved like a force of nature in her own right, loud and undeniable in her presence, but now she looks almost small, spine hunched inwards as she leans against the edge of the counter and huffs out a labored rattle of a breath.

And I know it’s opening a can of worms. I know it’s a stupid question, but there’s something in how her detergent-cracked hands look a little too much like my mother’s that makes me walk over to her and ask, “Are you okay?”

“Am I… Am I _okay?_ ” She laughs. The slant of the smile that explodes across her face is ugly and wrong, twisted up by the bitterness behind it. She laughs and smiles and it looks and sounds like acid, corrodes at the edges of her voice until it’s rough. This is what’s been lurking behind every sharp word and composed rebuke since Dallas. There is no righteous condescension or moral high ground to Sasha anymore. She’s a broken shell of herself, sinking into one of the mismatched kitchen chairs with her fists clenched in her lap. “I have had my whole ever-lovin’ _world_ torn apart. My husband is runnin’ around with the most wanted criminal in five different states, I’m an accomplice to I’ve lost count of how many crimes, and I…”

But even with her brokenness, there’s strength. Even with the tears welling up in her eyes and dripping down off her chin, she fights like hell to keep her head held high. She fights, and she almost wins, right up until the shaky admission of, “It’s all gone, Jean. Our whole life. We were gonna have a family, y’know, have a couple of kids and move out to the country once we got enough money saved up. And it’s all gone now. We can never go back. So no, I’m not okay. I’m never gonna be okay again.”

Sasha looks down at her palms, open and empty. There’s no more bitterness in her. Only a heavy sense of loss. Mourning. Like she’s remembering all the possibilities they’d once held, left with something that can’t even give her a measure of comfort. Memories at least give you the consolation of knowing they happened. There’s no cure for the hungry ache of lost dreams.

We did this to her, Marco and I. If we hadn’t come to Dallas that night, if Marco hadn’t called in that favor with Annie, if Connie had never come to the jewelry store, Sasha could have had the life she wanted. I’ve gotten to the point that robbing people of their money doesn’t keep me up at night anymore. But robbing people of their futures…

“You must hate us,” I whisper.

There must only be a certain amount of time that Sasha’s allotted herself for weakness. She dabs at her eyes with the corner of her apron and rolls her shoulders and stands up, spine ramrod-straight, all in the space of five seconds. Her jaw tenses in stubborn defiance of the sadness trying to drag her back down, and she goes back to making breakfast like nothing’s happened. “I got nothin’ against you. You don’t know what you’re doing.”

“Yes I do.”

“You don’t.” There’s that bitter laugh again, curling at the corner of her mouth before it fades into the cries of gulls flying past the window. “You wouldn’t have chosen this life if you understood what it meant.”

“You did,” I point out. “You chose Connie.”

“I s’pose you’re right,” she says after a beat, setting her mixing bowl down to turn around and look at me. “And maybe you do get it. You’re stuck in a dead end your whole life, and then you meet this man, this beautiful fool man who makes you feel like you can do anything. And part of you knows he’s no good, but it ain’t bigger than the part of you that would follow him anywhere. So you do, and you know it’ll go down in flames, and you know he’s changed you, and you know he’ll never settle down… and you know that’s what made you fall in love with that beautiful fool man to begin with.”

A leaden hurt settles in my chest, a weighted reality that’s not quite a fear so much as it is a somber knowledge that if things had been only a little different, my story could have been the same as Sasha’s. If I had wanted something softer, something closer to home, would I have fallen in love with Marco to begin with? I want to think that I would have, but part of me is afraid to admit it, seeing her here, miserable and following the man she loves like a plaintive echo in his ear, begging _give up, come home_ and praying that someday she’ll get through to him. I’m not sure if living like that would have been preferable to living my comfortable lie in the world before Marco.

“So maybe it’s not all gone, then,” I offer, putting the thought off for fear of what I’ll find if I examine it further.

When Sasha smiles, it’s a little closer to the real thing, soft and very pretty. “Maybe it’s not. It’s just hard to see it that way, sometimes.”

“It’ll get easier. It did for me.” Not necessarily true, not after all the bumps in the road I’ve dealt with, but I’d rather give her comfort than pure honesty. “You spend the first few weeks doing nothin’ but thinking about what you left behind, but sooner or later you just… you start to forget. You realize that lookin’ forward to the possibilities is easier than lookin’ back and remembering that you ran away from everything you loved.”

“You didn’t run away from everything you loved, sugar. You ran after it.”

I blink at her. “Not that I ain’t grateful for it, but that’s… surprisingly understanding of you.”

“I’m not a perfect person,” she says. “The Lord tells us not to judge, and I ain’t the best at followin’ that rule. I’ll judge Marco Bodt for being a selfish, lyin’, theivin’ lowlife, but I won’t judge him for who he loves. I won’t judge him for it, and I won’t judge you. I got enough judgment from my mama and daddy when I ran off with Connie to make me swear to never look down on someone for being in love.”

The sound of the ocean dies down enough for Marco and Connie’s laughter to carry from outside, loud, boisterous peals of sound that pull at me with a magnetism I don’t even notice until I’m standing by the front door looking back at Sasha. “That’s big of you.”

“Not really,” she shrugs, riding out the compliment with the same steadfast endurance that she would an insult, turning back to the biscuits with a small quirk of her lips. “Just common decency. Shame most folks don’t have any. If you see Connie, could you tell him to come inside?”

“Yeah, sure,” I nod and duck out onto the porch, feeling like Sasha and I have come to understand each other a little better for the whole encounter. She might be self-righteous and harsh, but she understands. That means more than I’d realized before.

Marco and Connie are standing by the car where it’s parked over by the porch, laughing over something clutched in Connie’s hand and shoving at each other like a couple of kids playing in a schoolyard. I roll my eyes and jog over to the Dodge, leaning over the hood and trying to see what they’re messing with. “Hey, Connie, your wife wants to talk to you.”

Marco starts humming a funeral dirge.

“She’s upset,” I frown.

“In other news, a bear shits in the woods.”

“Marco…”

“Don’t look at me like that,” he says with a big, winning smile, hair messed up from the wind coming off the ocean and newsboy cap tilted at a ridiculous angle. I stay irritated with him for a very admirable two seconds. “C’mere and look at what we found in the coat closet. Looks like one of the previous guests left it here.”

Connie’s holding a contraption with a collapsible lens and a big silver shutter on top, the sunlight glinting off of it. I huff and lean in for a closer look. “A folding camera? I’ve seen those before. Does it work?”

Marco nods, rounding the front of the car to stand beside me. “Yup. Found it sittin’ in a whole box of brand-new film, too. Must’ve forgotten it when they left. You ever wanted to be a model?”

“Not particularly.”

“Aw, c’mon, just one quick picture. You hop up there on the hood of the car, I’ll stand here…”

I go ahead and climb up to sit on the Dodge’s hood, gnawing on my lower lip and looking over my shoulder, forgetting how brave we’ve been every other day we’ve been out here together. For some reason, the idea of photographic evidence makes everything seem a little more dangerous. “We shouldn’t…”

“Why not? It’s off season, we’re the only people stayin’ here, and the staff’s all up around the corner outta sight.” Marco grins up at me from the ground, pulling his hat back into place, and I’m a little too sidetracked by how goddamn handsome he is to remember what I was going to say. He leans against the side of the car and braces one arm behind me so I don’t fall back, that smile never faltering as he looks at the camera and hums, “We’re on vacation, Jean. Live a little.”

And then he jerks his arm forward and hauls me straight down off the hood of the car.

I curse and scrabble for the first grip I can get, which ends up being twining my arms around his neck. Marco never had any intention of letting me fall, though, his arm wrapped securely around my waist, holding me so tight against his side that my feet never even touched the ground.

“Marco!” I sputter, and it just makes him laugh and hold me tighter, strong and steady as he nods at the camera lens.

“Smile, darlin’.”

And I do. I smile, because it’s so absurd, the two of us standing here in the springtime sun on a beach in Louisiana, staring down a camera lens and hiding from a world that would like to hunt us down for more reasons than one. I smile because I never wanted my story to be something like what Sasha wanted from hers. I ran after a beautiful fool man who will never change and whom I’d never want to.

I smile, and the shutter clicks, and I remember why I fell in love with him. In the whole wide world of people, there are very few men who can rob their way from Dallas to Dearborn with guns blazing and then fawn over something as silly as a folding camera with simple, childlike glee, and Marco Bodt is one of them.

We take more pictures, each one sillier than the last. Connie’s the one who suggests we start using props, and Marco breaks out one of the Tommy guns from the armory robbery, sticking his hands up and trying not to laugh long enough for Connie to take the picture while I stand there and take ages trying to look threatening before I give up and just start cackling. I mess around with the camera and get an unintentionally pretty picture of Marco looking out at the ocean before he takes over the photographer’s position and gets me in an ridiculous shot that involves me planting one foot up on the front bumper of the car and holding a revolver in one hand and a cigar in the other _(“Where did we even get cigars?” “Stole ‘em from Annie. Call it a tip.”)_. The shutter clicks and the camera whirs and we laugh so hard that it’s really a wonder the old caretaker doesn’t come shuffling down from his cabin at the front of the complex to see what the ruckus is, and when Connie gets the camera back, Marco pulls me in and kisses me hard just before the picture snaps, putting us on the frame of film in something so honest that none of the other ridiculous, posed pictures really matter.

“Okay, kids, break it up,” Connie snorts, fiddling with the focus knob and peering down at one of the dials. “Not like we could’ve ever developed these, anyway.”

I mutter something like assent, kicking at the sand that’s blown up onto the driveway. “You probably should go talk to Sasha, though. She’s not exactly in the wrong by being upset over all of this, y’know.”

“Yeah, I know,” he sighs, running a hand back across his close-cropped hair. “Tell you the truth, I never meant for her to get this tangled up in it. But she’s got this way of gettin’ herself tangled up regardless, and I just…”

“She’s worried about you. That ain’t a bad thing.”

“You’re right. I’ll see y’all after a bit.”

Connie goes back inside, and I shoot a sidelong glance over at Marco. “Well, I got no interest in going back inside. It’ll be a war zone in there.”

He laughs and kicks off his shoes and socks, throwing them up on the porch and rolling the bottoms of his pant legs up a few times. “Wanna take a walk?”

“Sure, why not?” I follow suit and grab his hand, letting him tug me down onto the beach.

The sand feels different beneath my bare feet than before, warmed by the sun and almost too-hot until I get used to it. But the tide is coming in, the foamy fringes of cool waves coming up to kiss at our ankles before retreating back down the shore. Instinct draws my attention out to the limit of my sight, watching the thin line where the water smears into the sky and feeling a little lost in the endlessness of it all until Marco squeezes my hand.

“Gonna make a run into town later and pick up a few things,” he says, running his thumb across the rises and dips of my knuckles. “As nice as this has been, we really should be hittin’ the road soon.”

I can’t say I’m sad to hear it. The ocean is beautiful and sometimes stagnancy is good to make repairs, but there’s always the call of the great wide somewhere waiting when you’re done making yourself functional again. “Where will we go? What’ll we even do, after all that shit back in Oklahoma?”

“We keep going with the plan,” Marco shrugs, free hand coming up to scratch at the back of his neck. “It’s our only option. We keep going, we stay outta Annie’s hair, and hopefully she stays outta ours. Now that we’ve got those big guns, we should be able to start doing bigger banks in bigger cities. Thought we might try Kansas City.”

“Oh,” I say, looking back out at the water.

“Oh?”

“Nothin’.”

“Bullshit, ‘nothin’.’ What’s going on?”

“I just…” There’s a tension that winds tight in my bones at even bringing it up, not because I’m afraid of Marco’s reaction, but because I know what a bad idea it really is. “I wondered if we could maybe drop back by Dallas.”

He stops in his tracks, head tilting to the side as he looks over at me. “You go a solid month without breathin’ a word about Dallas, and you’re suddenly all hot to trot over going back?”

There’s a reason I haven’t talked about Dallas. There’s a reason I haven’t been keen to go back, a reason that sounds a lot like _“SO DO I,”_ but I’ve been letting that fight haunt me ever since I left to the point that I came to the conclusion somewhere out on the road that I’d have to go back to at least try and pick up the pieces. I’ve done a lot of things wrong, but being able to admit them might be able to redeem me at least a little. I can’t put things back together the way they were – we _both_ had a part in that particular demolition; I tell myself that so the blame doesn’t crush me – but looking back, I could have handled it better. I could have said something. I could still go back and say something, although I’m still working on what I’d even say if given the chance.

“I haven’t talked to my folks in that long.” Not a lie. Not the whole truth, but enough of it that I don’t have to feel bad. “Ain’t even sent a letter. I knew Mom would want me home for my birthday, and I just wondered… forget about it. If you don’t think it’s worth the risk, I can drop a postcard in the mail before we roll out for Kansas City.”

Maybe in the end, I’m still a coward. Maybe I’m still a selfish piece of shit who doesn’t want to look at the mess I’ve made. I’ll take Marco’s word as an excuse to not have to face Eren. I’ll take it a little more easily than I’m willing to admit to myself.

“When’s your birthday?” He asks. I don’t say anything. “Jean?”

“Yesterday,” I mutter.

Marco’s eyes widen, a smile blooming over his pensive expression. “No shit!”

“Didn’t want you to fuss.”

“I’d have bought you somethin’ nice, though.”

The water is so cold it feels like a bite as it rushes up over my feet. I look over at Marco and say, “I’ve got everything I want.”

He laughs. “See, everyone says that.”

“Everyone says that, but I mean it. I’ve got whatever’s out there. I’ve got you. I don’t want anything else.”

“What about New York?” He looks like he doesn’t quite believe me, which hurts more than it probably should. “The big bands?”

If I’ve ever been in this for New York, I’m not now. I shrug and take another step out towards the incoming waves, letting them rise up to my knees and soak the rolled-up hems of my pants. “If New York happens, it happens. But after all this time, after everything…”

After taking all that I was and watching it spiral away like dust in the wind, after finding out that what I wanted and what everyone wanted _for_ me were such conflicting agendas that I could never hope to balance them, after learning what living really felt like, hammering heartbeats and searing skin on skin and the clarity you only get when everything is on the line… After everything…

_And you know it’ll go down in flames, and you know he’s changed you…_

“I think I feel a little better with a gun in my hand than a trumpet.”

“Do you really mean that?” He asks.

“Yeah, I do.” It’s one of a blissful few things I’m absolutely certain of. “Three years ago today, I stood in my living room and watched them carry my dad out in a body bag, and I figured that was it, y’know, that I was gonna be in Dallas forever. And I was gonna sit there and be miserable and live and die in Dallas because I thought that was what I was supposed to do. But then I met you, and then I got out, and I just… I feel different now. I _am_ different now. I don’t know if that’s good or bad.”

“Good and bad ain’t as black and white as you’re tryin’ to make ‘em.” Marco has always been one for simplicity and the refusal to mince words, but now it’s less for his own convenience and born of something more earnest, something that resonates in the place where his hand wraps around mine and behind the waves reflecting in his hazel eyes. When he speaks, it’s slow, careful, a point that’s been a long time coming. “It took me a long time – right up until not too long ago, actually – to learn that life ain’t like those stories you love when you’re a kid. There are no heroes or villains. There are good things and bad things, and everyone does both for their own reasons. Sometimes people everyone says are bad can do good in this world. I know I’ve seen too many folks who were supposed to be good people do shitty, horrible things to believe in clean-cut good and evil anymore. There’s no change for the better or worse, Jean. There’s just change. And it’s gonna happen whether you dwell on it or not. If you gotta dwell on something, then maybe you should just focus on the things that’ll always be the same.”

Easier said than done in a life where I’ve begun to feel like a stranger in my own skin. When I dig deep and try to get a grip on something constant, it’s like trying to hold water in my outstretched palms, pressing and straining only to watch it all drain away. I watch the waves breaking out on the horizon, and I ask him, “Like what?”

“I love you,” he says, as simple as saying that the tides will change, that the sun sets in the West. “That ain’t ever gonna change.”

“I love you too.” That’s it. That’s something permanent. When I feel like I’m slipping, it’s something to cling to.

I don’t feel the cool of the water anymore, half my senses lost under the bittersweet ache that I’ve found comes with loving someone so much that your body can’t hold it. He kisses me, and something in me slides into place, and I am home. This is home, _we_ are home, and that’s something that won’t change. If I have to look for constants to keep myself sane, I need only look beside me.

Marco pulls back with a sigh, sliding behind me and resting his chin on my shoulder. “We’ll make a stop in Dallas to see your folks as soon as we get a job in. I hate to leave, though. Feels like we just got here.”

Neither of us says anything for a long time, just standing there, watching the waves roll in. The sun reflects off the water like a rippling mirror, and I say, “It’s beautiful.”

“It’s terrifying.”

“You scared of the water?” I ask.

He shrugs, scooping a seashell off the sand by his feet when the waves retreat and skipping it across the water’s surface when they come back in. “Used to be. Now I’m just scared of how big it is. A man can live ten lifetimes and never make a dent in something the size of the ocean. It’s easy to disappear in.”

“And here I thought you just couldn’t swim.”

“I never learned when I was a kid, y’know,” he says. He looks distant, eyes unfocused and a hint of the old tension creeping back into his shoulders. “My brothers never had time to teach me. Got baptized in Village Creek when I was ten years old and pitched a fit over it. I was scared shitless that I was gonna drown. But Ma told me that God wasn’t gonna let me drown in the middle of being saved, so I went.”

I’m almost scared to find out the end of the story. “And?”

He snorts, taking his hat off and perching it on a piece of driftwood sticking out of the sand. “And I almost drowned, ‘course. Sucked in a big mouthful of water. Preacher had to haul me out, coughin’ and blue in the face.”

“Bet your folks were thrilled.”

“Just another letdown on a long list.” Marco grins. And then he takes a few running steps into the next oncoming wave and dives in, clothes and all, coming up into a flawless backstroke to get back over to me.

“I thought you said you couldn’t swim!” I laugh, leaning down to splash a handful of water at him as he passes.

“I learned,” he says, propping his hands behind his head and floating along, easy as you please. “If there’s a God out there, he’s too busy to save a little kid from a muddy creek. Don’t reckon he’s got much interest in saving an outlaw from the ocean, either. Only one way to guarantee you don’t drown, darlin’. You gotta learn to swim.”

“You’re being awfully prolific today.”

“Turns out I’ve got a lotta spare time to be philosophical when I ain’t gettin’ shot at.”

“Get outta there before you get caught in a riptide, Socrates… hey!” He grabs my leg as he swims past again, yanking my knee out from under me and sending me down into the cold seawater with a splash. I flail around and surface after a second, cursing up a storm and probably looking like a wet cat, shirt clinging uncomfortably to my skin.

Marco bursts out laughing, grabbing my wrist to tug me out where the water’s a little deeper. “Don’t fuss so much. It’s just a little water.”

“It’s saltwater; it’ll ruin my clothes!”

“I’ll buy you new ones.”

“It’s the principle of the thing,” I huff, blinking the stinging droplets out of my eyes and pushing sopping locks of hair back from my face. But Marco looks at me and smiles, and I can only stay mad for so long before I give in again, following that grin to my own detriment and floating on my back as the next wave comes in, borne along by the rising tide.

We stay like that for I don’t know how long, holding hands and looking up at the sky as the waves carry us down the abandoned beach, only heading back to shore when our waterlogged clothes weigh us down too much and our rented bungalow starts to fade from view.

“I think,” says Marco, wringing his shirttails out and shaking the water out of his hair, “that it’s been a good thing, gettin’ the chance to disappear with you for a little while.”

And maybe there is no good or bad, no black or white to the world. Maybe everything out there is some confusing shade of gray that I’ll have to deal with as soon as the road’s underneath us again. But for now, everything is vibrant blue and sunshine-warm, bathed in the tang of seawater and cemented by the coarse rasp of sand between our intertwined fingers. The myths of heroes and villains and the realities hiding behind them can wait. I’ll take my self-crafted Wonderland and stay for as long as I can before I carry the truths I’ve learned here back to a world that’s just as mad.

The good (and the bad, and everything in between) in the entity of us is only what we make it. Fate and serendipity and all that bullshit may have had a guiding role in whatever force that brought Marco and I together to begin with, but us coming back to each other time after time after time has been nothing short of the work of our own desperate, stubborn, _bloody_ hands. It’s high time we started owning that. High time _I_ started owning it.

“Yeah, it has,” I hum, bringing my free hand up to fiddle with the weight of the ring settled against my sternum. “But I wouldn’t wanna do it forever. We’re not us if we’re not gettin’ in some kinda trouble.”

We are what we’ve made of ourselves. And whether that’s good or evil or both or neither, I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.

The walk back to the bungalow takes a while. We'd drifted farther down the beach than we'd thought, and progress is hard through the wet sand that sucks down at our feet and tries to root us to a moment of that’s more than we can afford. Disappearing is a rare, fleeting respite, and giving into the temptation to stay there doesn't lead to anything we want. Peace is nice, but it’s not us. Marco and I have never been white picket fences and waking up to the same angle of the sun through the same window beside the same bed. We are not peace.

We are gunsmoke and roaring engines and kisses hard enough to bruise. We're something bigger than good or evil, beyond heroes or villains, and trying to hold us to a normal happiness is like trying to bottle a dust storm and tell it to be content. We've found our settle-down somewhere in the in-between, on lazy Sunday mornings in an ever-shifting canvas of motel rooms, in a hand to hold when the long stretches of road seem empty and endless. And that's enough for us. Maybe it's flawed logic or flat-out reckless abandon, but it seems to me that love in the middle of a firefight burns brighter.

Aside from scolding us for dripping on the floors when we get back inside, Sasha seems a little more at ease than when I last saw her, even managing a tight-lipped smile when I pay her back for the trouble with a seashell I found and promise to mop the mess up later. Marco calls the bathroom first since he’s making a run into town, but I don’t mind waiting, stretching out across one of the deck chairs on the porch in a clean set of clothes to let myself dry in the sun, sea salt settling in a fine dust as it curls my hair into a tangled mess.

“You comin’ with me?” Marco asks, stepping out onto the porch with damp hair, halfway through buttoning up his shirt.

I shake my head, stretching out on the deck chair and yawning. “Swimming wore me out. Reckon I might take a nap.”

“It’s ‘cause you’re an old man now. You hit nineteen and start fallin’ apart. Next thing you know, you’ll need a cane to stay on your feet during jobs.”

“You’re older than me,” I grouse, taking a halfhearted swipe at his arm and squinting up at him through the glare of sunlight washing across the porch. “When’s your birthday, anyway?”

“Sixteenth of June,” he says, dusting the sand off his newsboy cap before he puts it back on. “If everything goes smooth, maybe we can come back down to these parts for a while, call it a celebration.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” I know the Marco’s Plotting Something Grin when I see it, unfurling lazily across his lips as he ghosts fingertips down the curve of my neck. “Ditch Connie and Sasha, rent a place on the beach, and don’t let you outta bed for three days straight. Happy Birthday to me.”

“I don’t know. If you’ll be sittin’ at the ripe old age of…”

“Twenty-one.”

“Sakes alive, grandpa, you think your heart’ll be able to handle that kinda physical activity?”

The teasing touch turns into him flicking the side of my head. “Smart-ass. Guess we’ll find out, huh?”

“Guess we will,” I laugh, grabbing his hand and kissing his scarred knuckles. “Bring back a case of Budweiser, yeah?”

“You got it, darlin’.”

He leaves with a smirk pressed against my lips in a playful kiss, waving from the car before he pulls up the road and out of sight. I lie there in the sunshine and watch the tide come in, answering the call of these last few days of peace that we’ll allow ourselves. Inside, Sasha starts singing as she sets the table for lunch, and along with the rush of waves hitting the shore, it lulls me into an easy sleep.

I dream of floating in an ocean that turns to dust that clots sticky red beneath my fingers, the rush of waves in my ears turning to a roar, to gunshots, to screeching tires and a slamming car door and _Jean, Jean, Jean—_

I’m a light sleeper, but Marco seems to have forgotten that since he apparently feels the need to shake me like a rag doll to get me up, panic etched into every feature when my eyes snap open and clear up enough to get a better look at him. The description that he looks like he’s seen a ghost doesn’t even begin to cover it. He looks more like he just ran all the way back here with the Devil himself on his heels. “Wake up. Pack your shit, we gotta go, _now._ ”

Blinking the last of the sleep from my eyes, I sit up in the deck chair and stare at him blankly. “What? Thought you said we were stayin’ a few more days.”

“Change of plans. Get your stuff and hurry, but clean this place out. No traces; we can't leave nothin’ behind.”

“But why—“

“I knew I should've gone into town sooner,” Marco growls, cutting me off. He looks back at the sand settling across the long drive, takes a moment to make sure no one’s coming, and then starts to pace, fingers twitching until he pacifies them with a cigarette that he mumbles around as his feet creak back and forth across the porch. “Knew we'd been here too long, that it was too quiet, knew I should've kept an eye on the goddamn _papers…_ ”

The next time he passes me, I stand up and reach out to grab his hand, stopping him from wearing a groove in the floorboards or sinking any farther into his own head. There’s only a little flash of clarity when I do it, but I’ll take what I can get, bringing my other hand up to press against the thundering pulse beneath the hinge of his jaw and tilting his head down until his forehead’s resting against mine. “Are you gonna tell me what's going on, or is this another one of those things where I'm not allowed the liberty of knowing what I'm getting into?”

My answer comes in the form of a trembling exhale as Marco sinks down into the chair that I abandoned. I notice for the first time that he’s got a newspaper clutched in his hand. He looks back up at me, a horrible mixture of angry and scared and _hurt._ “Annie set us up.”

“What?” The apprehension makes me feel sick.

“That clean-up we heard Reiner and Bert doing back in Oklahoma? They never finished it. They left the guard we put in the back of the truck alive. The one who saw us and knew who we were.” The cigarette burns down to a useless stub between his fingers before Marco chucks it over the porch railing with a disgusted noise, shaking his head and starting to pace again. “Annie never needed help with the job. She needed someone to take the blame so her name stayed out of it.”

And he thinks he should have known that. He’s blaming himself for not being five steps ahead of the chessmistress herself. Oh, sweetheart, no.

“Why, though?” Even I don’t understand Annie’s game on that front, why she’d feel the need to go that far. “All we did was steal some guns.”

“We stole a _shit ton of guns_ from the _fuckin’ National Guard,_ Jean,” he laughs, the sound of it a little deranged. It spirals away on the sea wind, and he leans up against the railing with this breathless, stilted smile, like he can’t believe the full extent of just how fucked we are. “There's stealin’ from common folk, and then there's stealin’ from the government, which is a whole different animal.”

“Meaning?”

Marco unfolds the newspaper and flips it over to show me the front page, a huge headline over a block of text that reads _TEXAS OUTLAWS CAUSE NATIONWIDE UPSET._ “Meaning that our rise to infamy happened a hell of a lot quicker than any of us were prepared for. We're national news. Our names are in every paper from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco. Long story short, Uncle Sam is gunnin’ for our asses, and we’ve been down here with our toes in the sand. Now would you please stop asking questions I can answer in the car and _go?!_ ”

I go. In fact, I damn near _sprint_ back into the house, past a confused Connie and Sasha, back the hall and into our room, scooping up whatever I can see that’s already packed. My trumpet case, my last suitcase of clean laundry, the duffel bag of cash kept under the bed. By the time I’ve got it all in hand, Marco must have broken the news to the others.

 _“What?!”_ Sasha’s voice splits down the hallway like the crack of a whip, followed by her husband’s nervous half-laughter.

“Sasha, baby, yellin’ won't do nobody any good…”

The three of them are gathered around the table when I walk back into the kitchen, staring down at the newspaper. Sasha puffs up to something that seems twice her size, eyes narrowing as she glares at the headline and explodes with, “I _knew_ that woman was a snake, I _knew_ it! And after everything… You were like a son to her, Marco, and she does this to you? She's evil, I tell you. Plain old evil and vindictive.”

“No, she's a damn good businesswoman. And I… wait.” Marco stops mid-sentence, blinking at her. “Did you just defend me?”

Sasha sniffs, turning around and running water to wash up the dishes. “You've done your share of sinnin’, but you ain't ever turned on your friends like that. I'll give the Devil his due if he's owed it.”

“Thanks. I think.” He gives his head a little shake, clearing the confusion before he goes back to the task at hand. “Anyway, the publicity ain't as big of an issue as it could be. We're not recognizable to anyone who ain't making a point to look for us. The real problem’s over here on page three.”

Connie flips to the aforementioned page and says, “Oh _shit_.”

“What is it?” I ask, putting my bags down to go look over his shoulder.

“Federal agents,” Marco says. “They came down here lookin’ for us last week. We’re just lucky the papers got ahold of this in time to give us a heads-up. We need to operate under the assumption that they're still around.”

The article’s a continuation from the front page, but this one comes with a picture, two men in suits getting off a train with an air about them that says being seen isn’t exactly on their agenda. One’s tall and muscular and fair where the other is short and slight with dark hair, a weird juxtaposition between them that almost works like symmetry. I skim the article for information, but I don’t get far, stopping on the caption under the dark-haired agent’s picture.

“Wait a second… Levi _Ackerman_?” I frown, squinting at the grainy photograph in search of any kind of resemblance. “That's a hell of a coincidence if he ain't related to Mikasa, but all her folks are dead. Or at least as far as anyone knows, they are.”

“Yeah, something there smells funny, but I'm more concerned with this one,” Marco hums, leaning over my shoulder and pointing at the other man in the picture.

“Huh? ‘Former Texas Ranger Erwin Smith…’ What about him?”

“I know him,” he says.

That’s certainly a new development. “You what?”

“Well, I’ve met him,” Marco looks run ragged, slumping down in the nearest chair and taking his hat off to run a hand through his hair. “He trained my brother Miles back when he first started in the Rangers. Came to his wedding. I was just a kid, twelve years old, I think. He probably only spoke to me once or twice.”

“So what do you know about him that’s got you so worried?”

“From everything my brother ever told me, he’s a bad sonuvabitch. Always got his man, never lost a pursuit, something like fifty kills. He got injured bustin’ some bootleggers in Austin back in twenty-nine, resigned with honors and went up North to be a desk jockey for the FBI. Miles actually ended up with his job. If he’s back here, we don’t wanna run into him. We need to get on the road.”

“And go where?” Connie asks.

“I don’t know.”

Sasha looks up from the sink, putting away the last of the dishes. “And do what?”

 _“I don’t know!”_ Marco stands up so fast that his chair clatters to the floor behind him, open palms slamming down on the table with a loud _bang._ The kitchen goes very quiet. He sucks in a deep breath through his nose, eyes screwing shut, and when he opens them again, there’s a strictly-enforced calm in him, something that won’t allow the outburst of panic we all just saw to surface again.“Look, all I know is that the longer we stay in one place, the more danger we’re in. We’re not dealin’ with small-town cops anymore. These are trained professionals, and they know what they’re doing. And with a fella like Smith’s Texas Ranger experience on their side, they can track us as easily as they can breathe. We gotta move fast, we gotta move unpredictably, and—“

“We gotta go to Dallas,” I say, quietly, but not quietly enough to not be heard.

Marco gapes at me for a moment, processing what I’ve said. When he does, he’s less than pleased. “Are you insane? Jean, going back to Dallas is _suicide!_ The second we set foot over the city limit, every phone line’ll be on fire to report us!”

“If they think they’ve got us on the run, they won’t be expecting me to go home.” That’s reaching pretty damn far and we both know it, but it’s got enough logic in it that I can hold on and try to make it work. “We need to go.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Can I talk to you for a second?” I hiss, grabbing his sleeve and tugging him along back the hallway until we get to our room. I kick the door shut behind us and start packing loose clothes into suitcases, and that’s all the time it takes to set Marco off.

“What fool notion is runnin’ through your head that makes you think we can pull off a run into Dallas with our names plastered all over the goddamn _country,_ Jean, God Almighty!” he fumes, leaning back against the wall and shaking his head.

I set my jaw and keep folding shirts. “I’ve gotta warn my family.”

The strategy for arguing with Marco is always to keep things short and logical. That’s how he plays his game, and he’s used to everyone around him flying off the handle, used to sounding like the voice of reason. If I can take that ability from him, I’ve got a chance at talking myself home. I don’t have time for my earlier hesitations anymore. If there are federal agents out there after us, I can’t leave all of my unfinished business an unchecked box on a to-do list, not when the road only gets more dangerous from here.

Marco sees the angle I’m shooting for and immediately switches tactics, resting his hands over mine when I close a suitcase and leaning in to press his lips to my forehead. Soft. Reassuring. “Darlin’, we’re dealing with the law here. Your mother and your sister ain’t done nothin’ wrong. Legally, they can’t touch ‘em.”

“Corresponding with a fugitive _is_ illegal, Marco; you can bet your ass that they’ll be watchin’ every communication that goes in or out of that house,” I point out, the truth of my argument hollowing out a pit in my stomach with every further syllable of voice I give it. “I can’t call. I can’t send a letter. And I _can’t_ just drop off the face of the earth after all this shit crops up in the papers, not when I didn’t even get to say goodbye last time.”

He opens his mouth to make a counterpoint, but stops, frowning and asking instead, “Why didn’t you get to say goodbye to your folks the last time we were in Dallas?”

_SO DO I._

My stomach churns. “It’s nothin’.”

_Say something._

“Jean.” He doesn’t believe me. I’ve always been a shit liar.

_Jean…_

“I just…” There’s no way to word that kind of devastation delicately, no way to tell the whole truth that won’t result in a high probability of Marco driving back to Dallas for the sole purpose of planting a fist in Eren’s face, which won’t solve anything. So I dance around it as best I can, avoid the worst parts and give him a rough outline. “Before you came to pick me up, I had words with Eren. I left in a hurry and didn’t get the chance to go in and say goodbye to Mom and Nettie.”

He doesn’t let it lie there. Of course he doesn’t. He crosses his arms over his chest, brow knitting into a skeptical frown. “What d’you mean, you ‘had words with Eren?’”

“We got into it, we both said some things we shouldn’t have, I walked off and got in the car, and that was the end of it,” I snap, hoping that if I lie quickly it will be easier to mask. “And that’s why I need to go back. If we’re gonna be out on the road with no way for me to contact home, I need to explain things to my folks, and I need to apologize to Eren. You can’t just ask me to run off and leave all those loose ends.”

“I can if it means keeping you safe.”

A hot flare of pure, perfect rage flashes in my chest, and I almost want to savor it because of how uncomplicated it is. My hand tightens around the lid of the suitcase I’ve been packing, and I slam it down so hard that the latches flick shut of their own accord, rounding on Marco and feeling like I’ve got one of the storms I watched roll in off the ocean rising up under my skin. I’m done. I’m _done_.

I’ll never be done. The part of me – which is to say, the entirety of me – that loves him more than I can fathom won’t let me be done. See, I always had this issue with Alice. She was so quiet in Wonderland, so polite, never kicked up a fuss or hollered or pitched a fit, and that just didn’t seem real to me. Good thing I’m the author of my own story.

“Stop actin’ like I’m some child you have to protect!” I shout, batting away the hand reaching out to settle on my shoulder and not giving a single solitary damn about whether or not Connie and Sasha can hear from the kitchen. They need to be reminded of it too. “I signed up for this! I signed up for you, for us! Are you just gonna forget the part where I was the one who walked into Eastham with a gun and busted you out in the first place? I love you, Marco. I love you more than anything, but I _swear,_ you are the most pedantic, overbearing bastard on the _planet_ sometimes!”

“If I am, it’s because I love you and I don’t wanna see you get hurt because you don’t know—“

“If you say ‘you don’t know what you’re doing,’ I’m gonna fuckin’ _scream._ ” My fists clench so hard at my sides that my nails carve painful furrows in my palms, but I barely feel it, caught in the rise of my own indignation until it threatens to choke me, crawls up my throat and sparks hot behind my eyes. I blink the angry tears away before he can mistake them for weakness.

“I have tried – God help me, I have _tried_ – to be patient with all of this and accept that there are things I’ve gotta learn, but I’m gettin’ so damn _tired_ of you and everyone else trying to tell me that I’m some sort of unwitting accomplice to my own life,” I seethe, and for some ridiculous reason I could swear that the ring he gave me back in Dallas burns where it rests on its chain against my chest, a testament to everything we are, everything I _accepted_ that night and long before. “I don’t know what I’m gonna have to do to make it clear to everyone that I _chose_ this short of issuing my own goddamn press release, but don’t you stand there and try to tell me that I don’t know what I’m doing or that I don’t know the risks. I know. I just know that what I have to do is more important.”

Marco darts forward and kisses me so hard that our combined momentum knocks the backs of my knees against the edge of the mattress and we tumble down onto the bed, my hands yanking hard at his shirt collar and fisting in his hair like I’ve got something to prove. And while he doesn’t meet that fervor, he lets me go until I feel like I’ve made my point, holding me close, hands steady and gentler than mine as they map out territory that’s more than familiar by now.

“You’re fuckin’ beautiful when you talk like that,” he breathes out into the crook of my neck. I can feel him smile against my collarbone.

“You can sweet talk me all you want,” I pout up at him. “I’m still mad at you.”

He laughs and gets back up, straightening his rumpled clothes. “Will you still be mad at me if I take you to Dallas?”

“We’ll see.”

“Go load up the car. I can’t say no to that face.”

We pack in a hurry, cleaning out the house for any traces of us that could leave clues behind. The process doesn’t take long. When transience is your existence, you learn to pack up your life in a timely fashion. The others all head out to the car, and I stand in the kitchen, doing a last-minute sweep. The folding camera from this morning is sitting, forgotten, on one corner of the counter. Connie said that we could never develop the film, but something won’t let me take it out and destroy it. There’s a meaning in the unshed potential of those pictures. For a few short, wonderful days, Marco and everyone around us knowing that I chose him was a simple knowledge. It’s more complicated out there in the real world, but I pick those memories up and slip them into my bag, something to focus on when I need to remember the things that will never change.

* * *

We drive without stopping until we hit Lufkin, Texas, which is too many hours South of Dallas to bother making the rest of the trip. The beginnings of sunset slant across the town’s dusty main street, and no one looks at us twice as we circle and try to get the lay of the land, our usual cautionary procedures before stopping anywhere. Map out at least two escape routes. Find somewhere to meet if we get separated. Make sure everyone’s armed.

“We’ll come up through the South road, the same way Connie and I came in from Waco.” Marco’s been planning out our approach into Dallas even though we won’t be carrying it out until tomorrow, running through scenarios aloud as he circles the Main Street block again in search of a parking space. “I don’t wanna head into the city itself on the approach. Even making the loop around through Fort Worth and heading into West Dallas that way in broad daylight sounds a little too risky. If they’ve got any kinda jurisdiction to watch Jean’s house, it’ll be minimal, since they don’t actually have anything illegal on his mother. The most they can do is send patrol cars by the house a few times a day.”

“You figure they’d be doing the same to the garage?” I ask, fiddling with the buckles on my bag. Putting Eren in the line of fire isn’t something I want to do, but it might be a better option than taking the risk of sneaking into my own home.

Marco shakes his head, swerving into an open spot along the curb beside a drugstore. “Not unless Eren’s given ‘em any reason to think he’s got something to hide. Still, I don’t wanna make a stop there. Streets in West Dallas are too hard to get out of in a pinch. You wanna talk to him, you get your mom to call him and get him over to your place.”

The whole thing is such an ungodly powder keg of a situation that I don’t even know what the best approach would be. It’ll be hard enough getting into the house to tell Mom and Nettie what I need them to know. Getting Eren there – and then getting him somewhere private enough to have the conversation I’d need to have with him – would add a whole other layer of complexity. Maybe I could write him a letter and leave it with Mom, but that would run the risk of her opening it, and to leave a vague, unincriminating apology isn’t much better than walking away from him and not saying a word to begin with.

Maybe it’ll be better for us both if I come and go and he never knows I was there at all. Maybe I can ask Mom not to mention it to him and head up the road and accept that this is one bridge I’ve irreparably burned, stand at a distance and watch the smoke and live with the consequences even though all of me hurts at the thought of doing so.

“Fair enough,” I mutter, pushing the rush of thoughts back so they don’t swell up and overwhelm me. “We staying here tonight?”

“Looks good to me.” Eyes sharp as he watches the activity on the street outside, Marco clicks the safety on his pistol and slides it into the shoulder holster he’s got strapped on under his vest. “Far enough off the beaten path to not draw too much attention, far enough away from Houston for us to give Annie’s territory a wide berth.”

That’s enough to grab my attention back from where I’ve been getting ready to hop out of the car, turning around to look at him with a small sliver of fear crawling down my spine. “You worried about Annie gettin’ more involved in this?”

Marco purses his lips. “Annie’s already gotten what she wanted.”

“So why—“

“The woman fed, clothed, and supported me for four years, Jean. Just ‘cause I'm obligated by the laws of vengeance to shoot her on sight now don't mean I want to,” he snaps, looking a little more wounded than he probably means to.

Marco’s never wanted anyone’s pity, but sitting there and watching him, I think to myself, what a horrible thing, having his own family turn on him only to be betrayed by the next best thing. It’s a wonder he doesn’t hold every stranger he meets at gunpoint out of pure distrust. I remember what he said on the beach, about people the world calls bad doing good in the world, and I wonder if he’s ever really seen the good in himself. I can see it in him, in the fact that people he cares about have fucked him over time and time again and he still somehow loves me without reservations, in the fact that even after everything Annie’s done to him he still wouldn’t want revenge. Seeing bad in good and good in bad is such a subtle thing, something that’s hard to find in others and almost impossible to find in yourself. Maybe life doesn’t work like our childhood stories, but we’re raised and conditioned to think it does. When Marco looks in the mirror, I wonder if he sees a hero or a monster.

I don’t press the issue any more, and he gives me a look of quiet gratitude. I don’t think either of us like walking past mirrors much anymore.

“If I don't get food soon, I’m liable to gnaw my own arm off,” Connie drawls from the back seat, flopping against the passenger side window.

Marco rolls his eyes, taking one last appraising glance outside and letting his instincts get a read on everything. “This is a little town. Probably doesn’t get any of the big-name papers, but I still think the four of us heading into any one place might draw attention. We should split up and meet up back here in an hour. Jean and I'll eat at the diner on the corner, and you and Sasha can go to that deli down the street. Keep an eye out. Anyone gives you any funny looks or goes for a telephone, you get the hell out and come find us. You see me pull the car up outside, you grab your food and run. Understood?”

“Whole lotta fuss for a sandwich.”

“Shut up and go get your supper, Connie.”

We all bail out of the Dodge and go our separate ways, Connie and Sasha heading up the street while Marco and I duck into a little place on the corner called Mabel’s. It’s run by a sweet old lady who, if the thickness of her glasses is any indication, would probably too blind to tell who we are even with proper references, and her daughter, a snippy middle-aged woman with graying hair who’s too busy waiting every table in the place to pay us any attention other than jotting down our orders and serving the two fastest cups of coffee I’ve ever seen poured in my life.

“You look tired,” I tell Marco after we’ve been seated in our booth for a few minutes, noting how he’s already starting to hold himself with that tension wound in his limbs again.

“I wonder why,” he snorts over the top of his mug, grimacing at the substandard coffee but chugging it down anyway.

“I guess I'm just a little confused.” It’s hard having to talk in euphemism to avoid the wandering ears of the people sitting around us. It’s even harder not to reach across the table and grab his hand, twine my fingers up with his and try to find some way to take a little of the invisible burden off his shoulders. If the world were a fairer place, there wouldn’t even be a burden at all. “I thought this was what you wanted.”

“It's exactly what I wanted,” he says, sounding like a man who’s been given something he never wanted at all. “Guess I just figured out that what I wanted ain't all I made it out to be. It's more complicated when you're living it instead of just thinkin’ about it.”

The waitress comes back and practically throws our specials at us before darting off to get refills for her next table. This place is a lot like West Dallas, all tired eyes and stooped shoulders. Everyone in here had dreams, once. Maybe a few of them actually had them come true only to find out that every bit of happiness you get in life comes with collateral. “I think life in general works that way.”

“Yeah, reckon you're right,” says Marco, looking more resigned than comforted.

“We'll make it work, though.” I smile over my shitty coffee and something I think is supposed to be Salisbury steak, trying not to think about how things have grown dark indeed when _I_ have to be the ray of sunshine in a bad situation. “We will.”

We will. We have to.

The food’s not fantastic, but it’s not horrible, and we’re both so hungry that we bolt most of it down in the space of a few minutes, quiet except for a few snatches of small talk that feels almost like a script. It’s strange, how little we can actually talk about when surrounded by strangers.

But it’s not scripted in the least when Marco looks past me and softly whispers, “Shit.”

“What is it?”

“I want you to stay calm.” Everything he says is measured and slow, but there’s something wild in his eyes, a raw kind of fear that I haven’t seen there since Eastham, barely held in check. “Don't make a fuss, but look behind you. Real casual, like you're checking the specials on the board.”

I do as he says, looking at the half-erased chalk marks, but I can’t see what’s got Marco so terrified. “What am I looking at?”

“The two fellas sittin’ in the booth beside the door.”

Two guys in suits, immersed in conversation with each other. One with his back to me, tall and built like a refrigerator, the other small and bird-boned, glancing around the restaurant with a coolly critical gaze that nags at me with its familiarity until I remember it searing straight down a camera lens and right up at me from page three of the newspaper this morning. Agent Levi Ackerman locks eyes with me for a moment, then goes back to being more interested in his cup of tea, and I’m officially the most scared I’ve ever been in my life.

It’s fucking bizarre, how capable I am to stay steady through a terror that _roars_ through me like a wildfire, cancelling out all my thoughts in a blaze of white noise as I pivot slowly back to face Marco, feeling like I’m choking on my tongue. “Holy mother of—“

“Stay _calm,_ Jean,” he says, a pointless admonition when I’m too scared to scream, too scared to do anything but sit there and wonder why I’m not a crying heap on the floor yet. “I don't think they know we know they're here.”

It takes a long session of wrestling with my psyche to make my head clear up enough to realize he’s right. If everyone in the situation were completely self-aware, there would be bullets flying right now. I force a few deep breaths in and out; try to scale my heartbeat back to the point it doesn’t physically hurt. “D’you think they followed us?”

“Either they did, or we've got the worst luck in the entire world.” Marco’s voice drops to a whisper, focus shooting around the room as he tries to mentally map out exits. “We need to get Connie and Sasha and get outta here.”

“How? Do we just run for it? Stick the place up and back out?” Through the fear, I’m a little proud of myself. Not once have I considered defeat as an option. Having a mental breakdown, maybe. Pissing myself, definitely. But accepting that the road ends here has never crossed my mind. There might not be a change for the better or worse, but I’ve made a change for the braver, and that’s saying something.

“Woah, woah, slow down.” He closes his eyes and rubs at his temples, thinking it out. “We've got the advantage here. We're in a public place, and they don't want this to turn into a shootout. I think we can walk away, if we do it right.”

“I'm listening.”

He bites at his bottom lip in a way that says _you’re not going to like this_ before he ever opens his mouth. “I'm gonna step out and go get the car. You stay here and wait. They can't both get up and follow me because that frees you up to pull something, and they won't spilt up because they'll lose two-on-one advantage.”

I’m shaking my head before he’s even halfway done speaking. “You can't just walk out there alone. What if they have backup?”

Logically, he makes sense. But Marco’s not accounting for the fact that from the very beginning, we’ve been in this together. He’s not accounting for the fact that we’re both sitting here scared, but maybe it’s for different reasons, because I’m not half as scared of dying or getting caught or whatever else Justice could do to me as I am of losing him and not being able to do anything about it as soon as he walks out that door. His logically sound plan is a risk my foolish heart’s not willing to take, even if alternate routes end up being violent means to violent ends.

He curses under his breath, something about not having time for this, and starts sliding out of the booth, his decision already made whether I like it or not. “If they had backup out there, they wouldn't be sittin’ in the diner with the infamously armed and dangerous outlaws. I'll be back in five minutes.”

“Be careful,” I tell him, because _I love you_ feels a little too much like _Goodbye._

“You too.”

Marco walks out the door, and no one tries to stop him. But as soon as he’s out of sight of the big front window, the two agents rise from their seats, moving not after him, but back towards our table. Towards me. Instinct tells me to run, but I’m paralyzed, nailed to my seat and watching with wide eyes as the two of them slide into the side of the booth that Marco abandoned. For a flash of a second, I finally give into cowardice and think that this is how it ends, that I’ll be in handcuffs or bleeding out by the time Marco gets back. But then I remember to be stubborn, swallowing the acrid burn in the back of my throat and reaching for my waistband with the faint hope that I’m quick on the draw and their aim is off and someone in our group knows how to patch up bullet holes.

“Easy, son, we’re just here to talk,” the taller of the two – Former Texas Ranger Erwin Smith, the one Marco’s had dealings with – says, placing one hand flat on the table. I wait for him to follow up with the other one to show that he’s not going for a weapon until I get a better look at his jacket, see where the sleeve’s pinned up. No right arm. Marco had mentioned that he’d been injured badly enough to make him resign from the Rangers, but I hadn’t imagined anything to the extent of losing a limb. If he notices me staring, he takes it in stride, very cordial for someone with a whole company’s worth of dead outlaws under their belt talking to one of Texas’ Most Wanted. “You know who we are?”

“I know who you are well enough to not believe that you’re just here to talk,” I reply, guarded, hand still wrapped around the grip of the Colt.

“Relax, kid,” Levi Ackerman scoffs, a thick accent coloring his voice that’s undeniably Bostonian even though I’ve only ever heard a few examples on the radio. When I still don’t back down, he clicks his tongue on the back of his teeth and pulls a handgun out of his suit jacket, plain as day, and drops in on the table between us with a clatter. Five or six people sitting around us suddenly decide that it’s time to leave. “We’ve been sitting over there for half an hour. If we wanted you dead, you’d be dead already, right? We don’t want this getting ugly any more than you do. You can get up and walk out any time you want. We’re just here to make an offer.”

Slowly, I pull my hand off my weapon, fixing them both with a cautious stare. “What kind of offer?”

“When we came down last week, our first stop was Dallas,” Smith says, leaning over with slow, deliberate motions to reach into his briefcase and place a folder on the table, flipping it open to pages and pages of handwritten notes. “Preliminary interviews and all that. We talked to your family, your boss, your ex-girlfriend…”

My blood runs cold. “Whatever it is, leave them out of it. They’ve got nothin’ to do with any of this.”

“That’s not what I mean.” He shakes his head, snapping the folder shut and watching me from across the table. There’s nothing really threatening about the way he holds himself, nothing antagonistic in the way he’s looking at me. If anything, he just looks curious. “They painted a very vivid picture of you. One that I see now was accurate. I know what bad people look like, Jean. I’ve spent my whole life chasing ‘em. And I don’t think you’re a bad person. I think you’re a good kid who’s made some poor decisions and fallen in with the wrong crowd and doesn’t know how to fix it.”

“It was different before, but you’re in the public eye now, and every little thing you do is gonna get sensationalized within an inch of its life thanks to the goddamn media.” Ackerman’s a little more straightforward in his appraisal, arching an eyebrow at me and drumming his fingers on the tabletop. “Doesn’t matter what you actually do or who you actually are. What you’re going to be is what those papers say, what everybody thinks. And right now, your friends and family have been fighting tooth and nail to make sure that the way people see you is as a misguided boy that got dragged into this against his will. That’s the way it’ll stay if you get out now. I can’t say the same for if you keep going the way you are.”

It takes me a minute to figure out what they’re approaching me with, and when I do, the thought sickens me. “You want me to sell Marco out.”

Right now, Marco’s got more red on his ledger than I do. He’s got all the robberies and jailbreaks from before we met, on top of the escape from Eastham, the string of thefts after that, the murder in Missouri, and the dead guard in Oklahoma that Annie framed him for. And even though I’m attached to all of that, in the eyes of the public I’m still just an accomplice. People aren’t calling us the Kirschtein Gang. The law will take a plea bargain and testimony from me and let me walk away if it’ll help them get Marco, and with the length and severity of his rap sheet, they’ll get him. They’ll get him nice and tight in a hangman’s noose.

Smith must see the color draining from my face, because he cuts in over his partner and starts trying for damage control. “We want you to look out for your own best interests. Look, I know how it is.”

“I really don’t think you do.”

“You start to work with someone, you get… attached.”

It’s right there, a certain inflection on that last word, a _knowing_ in his expression, and I’m not quite as scared as I am _pissed_ when I remember him talking about interviews and those pages of handwritten notes. I won’t claim to have taken the high road in every choice I’ve ever made, but there are some blows so low that you don’t ever expect people to go for them.

“You talked to Eren,” I laugh, bitter and hollow. Guess I had it coming.

“If it’s any consolation, he didn’t tell me anything outright,” Smith says, shutting his briefcase. He’s trying to come off approachable, but he looks a little smug. “It’s part of my job to read between the lines. Not his fault I’m very good at it.”

I’m not here to stroke anyone’s ego. “So you know, and you still expect me to sell him out.”

“What I expect you to do is take a step back from your current situation and _think_ , Jean. Take a day or two and really think on it. The chance we’re givin’ you to walk away from all of this is no small offer, and it ain’t a crooked deal. At the end of the day, you’re just a kid. I don’t think you really know what you’re doing.”

There it is again. There it _fucking_ is again.

It’s been a problem from the beginning of my life, really, this whole _you don’t know what you’re doing_ thing. I must be a magnet for people who like to constantly inform me that I’m a trainwreck waiting to happen and then throw their hands up in self-defense and claim they only say it because they care. I’ve never needed anyone’s help to know that I’m a mess. The help I’ve needed was in grabbing the wheel on an existence that’s been spinning out of control since its inception.

And it’s the most hateful kind of funny, how all those people will stand around and talk about what a shitshow your life is, but no one ever wants to help set things straight. They’ll yell from the sidelines and expect one man to fix a life that it took several people and tragedies to break, or maybe they’ll be like Eren and try to throw lifelines to keep you tethered home, but no one wants to hop on board and help get things back to some form of at least not falling apart. No one wants to risk getting caught in the wreckage.

Except for Marco. Marco’s crazy enough to jump on a miserable goddamn disaster heading at breakneck speed towards a cliff. I love him for that.

And I knew what I was doing when I said I loved him. I knew what I was doing when I dug the gun up from under Connie and Sasha’s porch. I knew what I was doing when I broke him out of Eastham and held him through the weeks of nightmares that wouldn’t leave him when he woke up. I knew what I was doing every single time I kissed him and every single time I fell asleep beside him and every single time we _fucked_ and I pointedly refused to feel ashamed. I’ve known what I was doing from the first day I looked at him standing there on the side of the road and thought that there was more to him than he let on, and I will never again let someone tell me otherwise.

The Dodge pulls up outside, idling across the street, and I look over at Erwin Smith and tell him, “All due respect, sir, but I know exactly what I’m doing and what choices I’ve made, and one of those choices ain’t gonna be turning Marco in as part of some bargain.”

“You think on that, Jean,” he says, like he’s asking me to consider a business proposal instead of the possibility of running around with a bounty on my head. Same thing, I guess, depending on which end of the gun you’re standing on. “You think on that real hard.”

I don’t have to think on it. I don’t have to think on it any more than I think about slipping the folding camera out of my bag and leaving it behind in the booth when I get up and leave, the images of every choice I’d make again and again burned into the film. Marco already has Connie and Sasha in the car when I make it out, burns rubber up the road in a stony silence that I let settle over me until it makes my lingering terror feel like strength.

I know what I’m doing. I know who I’ve chosen. And for a few petulant, rage-fueled hours, all I can think is that it’s about time someone else knew, too.


	21. Marco

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings for graphic violence/eye trauma/general hell being unleashed this chapter. i am so sorry.
> 
> i have a [tumblr.](http://southspinner.tumblr.com)

I’ve been fighting for a long damn time.

There have been so many years of stubborn refusal to settle down and be who I was supposed to be, of coming up swinging after getting ground into the dirt again and again, so many scrapes and bruises that no one could really see. There have been times when I’ve wondered if I ever knew peace at all. And the one thing I tell myself to help keep my grip on the world is that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if I wasn’t fighting myself half the time.

There’s been a war in me for as long as I can remember, but it used to be manageable, little skirmishes that flared up and died down with time and lessons learned. Then Jean came along, and those skirmishes became battles. Then Eastham happened, and those battles became atrocities. Then everything since December followed close enough behind us to nip at our heels, a constant reminder that we didn’t have the luxury of a ceasefire, and those atrocities became me scrambling just to keep myself from being torn apart. It’s a skill I’ve never quite perfected.

I’ve been fighting for as long as I’ve been breathing, but I do a little better against outside forces than against my own demons. Outside an abandoned barn in the gray hours before sunrise, they’ve almost won, only retreating when Jean pokes his head outside and asks, “Have you slept at all?”

“I'm a little busy.” Someone’s got to keep watch, and I know what’s waiting for me the second I go to sleep. My control’s shoddy enough when I’m awake nowadays, and my subconscious is a real bitch when it comes to destroying me. I know all the best ways to rip myself to shreds.

We drove out of Lufkin like bats out of hell, spent the night winding all over half the back roads in Eastern Texas with our eyes locked on the rearview until my hands were shaking too hard to hold the wheel steady and Jean insisted that we stop. No hotels, no motor courts. Not worth the risk. Connie and Sasha had been asleep in the backseat for an hour by the time we found the dry-rotted old barn, and Jean seemed to pick up on the fact that I needed space, letting me stand sentinel outside even if it was only to watch the moon’s slow progress across the dusty horizon.

“They didn't follow us,” he says, leaning against the wall and paying no mind to the flecks of peeling paint that fall to his shoulder. “Stayin’ up all night to watch an empty field won't help anyone.”

And letting myself slip into the chaos brewing in my own head won’t help me. “We've seen a lotta shit in the past twenty-four hours. I need to get my head screwed on straight. Don't think I could sleep if I tried.”

Jean stands up straight again, an uncertain slant to his mouth. “D’you want me to leave you alone?”

“No.” My response is a little too sudden and desperate, but he’s seen me far more vulnerable than this. I reach up and grab his hand as he steps back towards the door, nodding at the empty spot beside me on the ground. “Think that'd only make it worse, honestly.”

The battle doesn’t die. The war rages on. But everything’s a little easier when I look beside me and remember what I’m fighting for.

He’s quiet for a while, sitting down next to me and lighting a cigarette, the match flaring in the darkness. His lips wrap around the smoke like half-formed words, trying to place what he wants to say, probably striking something far more complicated before going with, “You've gotta stop blaming yourself for all of this, Marco.”

“Who says I'm blaming myself?”

“No one has to say anything. You’re making it pretty clear.” I’ve never been able to figure out if I love it or hate it, the way there’s never been any fooling him. Putting the burden of my struggles on Jean’s shoulders is something I’ve never wanted to do – call me sinner, call me outlaw, but never let it be said that I don’t believe in carrying your own weight – but he’s always been so determined to take them, reaching up and pressing a slender palm to the side of my face, the pad of his thumb tracing the sleepless shadows beneath my right eye. “Baby, you had no way of knowin’ what Annie was gonna do, and no one’s gonna fault you for wanting to have faith in her. She was your friend.”

And my misplaced faith in her could very well be the end of all of us. I knew even before Oklahoma that I couldn’t trust Annie. Arguably, I’ve known that I couldn’t trust Annie from the day I met her. But that idealistic part of me, the stupid kid who looked up from a gutter in Houston, beaten and half-dead, and saw something that looked enough like hope to keep him going, wouldn’t let me see it. I blinded myself so I wouldn’t have to face the much uglier truth until it came back four years later to bite me in the ass.

“Annie doesn't have friends,” I grimace, tracing out lines and patterns in the dust beside my feet.

“Someone you trusted, then. Someone who took care of you. No one ever wants to believe that someone they care about would turn on them like that. This is Annie’s fault, not yours.”

Arguable. Who’s really at fault in that situation, the one who never made any qualms about being ruthless, or the one who convinced himself that he was the Prodigal Son, the exception to the rule? But Jean’s trying to help, so I don’t push it, letting my head fall back against the wall and watching the stars begin to fade one by one from the sky. “Don't matter whose fault it is; we've got those Feds on our asses regardless.”

“We do,” he nods. “And if we’re gonna stay ahead of ‘em, we need you. You're the one with the plans. I just stand there and hold the gun.”

I frown, the idea that he really believes what he just said putting a sour taste in my mouth. “You do more than that.”

Jean just smiles, stubbing his cigarette out beside him and spinning the ring I gave him around on its chain, the citrine catching what’s left of the moonlight. “Sleeping with you don't count towards our professional accomplishments.”

It kills me a little, the simple earnestness with which he makes himself out to be anything less than extraordinary. Maybe it comes from the life he left behind, the arid vacuum of West Dallas that almost snuffed his spark out forever. But it's the fact that he still blazes that makes him so remarkable, the fact that he refused to burn out in a city of charred matches and wasted potential. But even now, miles down the road and months away from anyone who would dare to think of him as commonplace; Jean still has no idea how bright he shines.

My beautiful boy, he's the last real dreamer, the one thing left in a monochrome canvas of empty faces and dried-up dreams that could make me believe in something other than myself.

“I mean it, Jean. You don't give yourself enough damn credit. You never have.” He goes to wave me off, and I grab his hand again, holding tight until he actually looks at me. “D’you have any idea the kinda balls it took for you to sit in there with those guys by yourself while I went to get the others?”

“They came over and talked to me, y’know,” he says.

My blood runs cold. “They _what?_ ”

I left him. I walked off and _left him,_ and if Smith and Ackerman felt bold enough to slide right up and have a conversation, God only knows what else could have happened if things had gone wrong. All of my airtight plans and careful strategy could have ended with Jean dead or in a prison cell.

And he trusts me. He's sitting there giving me that look that's always seen through every ounce of my bullshit, and he _still_ fucking trusts me.

I am so very far from ever deserving him.

He shrugs, looking from me to the sky. “The two of ‘em walked over after you left, we had a conversation, and then I got up and left.”

“What did they want?”

“For me to hand you over in exchange for them lettin’ me walk.”

 The fear settles hot and corrosive in my gut, and through the sharp spike of adrenaline hitting my veins, I suppose that I should at least be grateful to him for giving me more warning than Annie did. He was right when he said no one ever wants to believe that someone they care about would turn on them like that, but I guess I understand being made an offer you can't refuse. Maybe if I start running now, I can get a head start.

“What’re you looking at me like that for?” Jean snorts, scooting down until he’s sprawled out on his back in the dust. “I told ‘em both to shove it.”

He turned them down. He had one shot to walk away from all of this scot free, and he said no. My panic fades, replaced by a sweet ache in my chest that refuses to fade, birdsong humming up through my ribs.

I lean down and kiss him and whisper, “You are the bravest man I’ve ever met.”

“I don’t know about all that.” He laughs, still stubborn, refusing to see the best in himself.

“I do.”

Jean’s lips twitch into a frown, fingers flitting over his ring again. “I just don’t ever wanna go back to the way things were before. If I’ve ever been brave, it’s only because what I have with you makes me that way.”

“That’s a load of bullshit.” I don't believe in much, but Jean is one of my small, self-constructed pantheon. In a world of shaky ideals, I have always believed in him, but the bigger challenge is making him believe in himself. I trace the delicate structure of his hand in mine, wondering how many times I'll have to tell him before he accepts it as truth. “You don’t need me to be what you are. You never have. All I did was give you a nudge in the right direction. Or the wrong direction. We’ve already had a conversation about morality and how it’s all a big mess in the end.”

“Everything’s kind of a big mess right now,” he says. I don't disagree with him.

It’s not like I wasn’t used to everything being a mess. What I wasn’t prepared for was everything spiraling out of my control, growing so big that I didn’t stand a chance at handling it on my own anymore. I never expected to need Jean to help me stay as close to stable as I’m ever likely to get. Needing anyone is bad business when you live like I do – expecting anyone to have your back is practically inviting them to stick a knife in it – but he’s always found a way around my better judgment, stubbornly beautiful with his bonfire heart and the dimple in his cheek when he smiles.

I stretch out beside him, turning over to watch the way the fading starlight reflects in his eyes. “It’s a goddamn tragedy, y’know.”

“What is?”

“That you can’t see yourself the way I see you.”

Jean’s lips press into a thin line, and he scoots closer to me, laying his head on my chest and humming, “Some tragedies go two ways.”

“What,” I ask, “are you sayin’ that I don’t see myself the way you see me?”

“You never have,” he says, and I shouldn’t find comfort in the fact that he sounds so heartbroken.

Maybe that’s why I need him so much. My own perspective has been so skewed after years of whiplash between being my parents’ greatest shame, Annie’s most powerful chess piece, Connie’s best friend, society’s poster boy for what not to do. Despite trying so hard to be something self-made, I let myself be shaped by them, molded into a form I barely recognized when I looked in the mirror. But the way Jean sees me is something softer, simpler. He’s seen me at the top of my game, and loved me. He’s seen me stripped down to the barest, ugliest parts of myself, and loved me. He’s seen past every front I’ve ever tried to put up until I realized that it was foolish to even bother with them anymore when it was so much easier to just _be_ with him, to let the fact that he’s still here after everything settle under my skin and keep me together for a little bit longer. It must be the ultimate selfishness, that I’m so in love with the way he loves me.

If we had a little more time, maybe I could teach Jean that same selfishness. Maybe one day we’ll love each other more than we hate ourselves, and that will be the day we become mirrors, reflecting what we’ve seen in each other all along so we can finally see it in ourselves. But that’s a pipe dream that sounds a lot like peace, so I can’t put too much stock in it. Any time we’ve tried peace before, the war only comes back more violent. What we have now is enough to keep us going, and in the grand scheme of things, that’s all we really need.

“Well, guess it’s a good thing we have each other, then,” I tell him, pressing a kiss into his messy hair.

“Yeah,” he says, “it is.”

For the first time all night, I’m at-ease enough to actually feel tired. “We should head back inside, try to nab some sleep. We’ll head into town this afternoon.”

Jean sits up, dusting off his shirt and blinking at me. “Why not wait until tonight? We’d have the dark on our side.”

“Too late.” I shake my head. The one perk of being out here alone with my own thoughts all night was that I had the opportunity to figure out the safest way to do all of this. “I wanna be well into Kansas by tonight.”

Smith and Ackerman are federal agents with federal jurisdiction. They can follow us anywhere we go. But their teeth and claws come from cooperation with local police forces, and they can’t follow us over state lines. As long as we keep up our holding pattern, we only have to worry about the two of them on our tails instead of the combined might of the entire Texan criminal justice system.

“Is Kansas what’s best for the plan?” Jean asks, still not convinced.

“We can't get caught. That's the beginning and end of the plan now.” Anything more grandiose than that went out the window the moment the government got involved. Infamy and intrigue are nice, but life and freedom are nicer. “No matter what happens, we can't get caught.”

“You're scared of going back to jail.”

“Nah. At this point, they'd just give me the chair. I wouldn't be sittin’ in prison for years.” The idea of that doesn’t frighten me nearly as much as the one that follows it. “But you would. You've never killed anyone, so they can't give you the death penalty. They'll throw you in somewhere like Eastham to rot, and you'll only _wish_ you were dead. That's what I'm scared of.”

Jean puts up a good fight against his own fear, but a little bit of it slips out and skates across his face, a short tremor that he bites back before getting to his feet and offering me a hand. “Well, one way to make sure that doesn't happen.”

“Yeah?” I let him pull me up, a cloud of dirt falling behind me that settles in the dents our bodies left behind. Dust angels.

He grins, mischief tugging at his lips when he presses them to mine. “We don't get caught.”

“Sounds like a plan.” I watch him head back towards the door of the barn, feeling like I need to say something but not knowing what. “Jean.”

“Hm?”

“You’re a damn fool for not taking a way out when they offered it to you.” A stubborn, wonderful, incredible fool, and braver than I know how to articulate.

“I know,” he says, walking back over and tangling his fingers up with mine.

“I’m glad you’re still here.”

“Me too.”

Whatever the plan is, it can wait a few more minutes. It’s not peace. Both sides of the battle are just taking their time reloading, and Jean and I take the respite to stand in the empty barnyard and watch the sun begin to rise. The rays cut through the dust hanging in the air and paint everything a deep, vibrant red. Pa always used to say that nothing good ever happened on a day with a red sun rising. I lean over and kiss Jean before we go back inside just to prove him wrong.

* * *

“If Jean gets to talk to his family then I have the right to talk to mine! There’s no difference!” Sasha protests about a mile outside of West Dallas, leaning up over the driver’s seat so that her harping rings right in my ear.

We’ve been driving for hours, and we all look and feel like hell. Yesterday’s clothes and no showers, five o’clock shadow for Jean and Connie and me, Sasha’s hair coming down from its updo and sticking to her forehead in the heat, and short tempers all around. The fact that I haven’t kicked both the Springers out on the side of the road yet should make me a candidate for goddamn sainthood.

I fight the urge to bash my head against the steering wheel. “The difference is that Jean’s family won’t call the laws.”

“My folks would never turn us in if they thought it’d get me hurt.” I don’t trust Sasha’s folks any more than I trust Sasha, and I’m about to tell her as much when she sits back in her seat, only visible in the rearview mirror, looking at her open hands in her lap. “All I wanna do is let them know I’m all right and try to explain some of this mess. There are no official sources that place me with you boys. For all they know, I just disappeared. I know you probably don’t have any, but try for a little sympathy, Marco.”

It’s a bad idea. It’s a terrible idea, and I shouldn’t even be considering it, but the fact that something’s important enough to make Sasha Springer actually look defeated probably carries more weight than I realize. Jean reaches over and lays a hand on my shoulder, looking from her to me with this weighted expression, and I’m fucked.

I let my head drop back against the seat with a long groan. “Dammit. I’ll drop the two of you off before we go to Jean’s and pick you up on the way back. If something goes wrong ‘cause of this, it’s on your own heads, you hear me?”

She nods, sitting up a little straighter and brushing her hair back into place. “Thank you. I really appreciate this.”

“Stop being nice to me, Sasha. You’re givin’ me the creeps.”

“It’s just up this road here; they’re still in the apartment over the old dry cleaners…”

Sasha’s family lives in a familiar part of West Dallas. I drop her and Connie off in the alley beside the business they lost a few years back, waiting to make sure they get safely through the side door before pulling back out onto a bustling street I’ve been down several times. We drive past the pawn shop, and I tug my hat down a little, antsy with all the people milling around. The traffic’s as clogged as ever, and we get hung up in the most inconvenient spot. I think back to the red sunrise and decide that today just wasn’t fated to go well.

Jean looks broken as he stares out the passenger side at the open doors of the garage, where Eren’s circling a brand-new Model A with smoke pouring from under the hood, oil-stained hands prodding at different inner workings that only seem to make the problem worse. He gives up after a few more seconds and walks back into the lobby, a weary slump to his shoulders.

Jean’s hand drifts down towards his door handle.

“We can’t stop, darlin’,” I warn him, tapping the gas pedal as the traffic starts to thin out again.

“I know,” he says, watching Eren walking around the lobby until we turn the corner, slumping back in his seat. “It’s probably for the best, anyway. I don’t think this is something I can fix.”

Something doesn’t add up. My less-than-friendly attitude towards Eren aside, he and Jean have always been close, the kind of close that should mean that Jean wouldn’t just let whatever argument they had fester without trying to patch things up. He doesn’t admit defeat that easily.

“What did y’all even fight about?” I ask him, concerned with the hollowness in the way he holds himself.

“You.” Jean pauses, frowns, shakes his head. “Well, me. It was complicated.”

“Yeah, I reckon it was.” Probably more complicated than I want to know.

The road between town and Jean’s house is deserted and empty, dust billowing in the wake of the car as we round corners and take detours to stay off the main path. Jean gets more and more restless the closer we get, hands twitching in his lap by the time I pull up behind the house so the car stays out of view from the road.

“You can stay in the car if you want,” he chokes out, grabbing one of the duffel bags from the back. “I don’t know how things are gonna go over in there.”

“All the more reason for me to go with you.”

“Marco—“

“You don’t have to do this alone.” I hop out of the driver’s side and round the car to stand with him, not knowing if I should risk trying to kiss his insecurities away when someone could look out the window any moment. “I can’t claim to know how you feel, ‘cause it ain’t like I’ve got anyone but you left to disappoint, but you’re gonna be okay, darlin’. Your mom loves you. Once you explain things, I’m sure it’ll be fine. And if it’s not, I’ll be right there with you.”

He just gives me a stiff nod and heads for the back door, opening it slowly so the hinges don’t creak. The house looks the same as the last time I was here, if a little better-stocked, more food in the cupboards, a new linen tablecloth across the kitchen table. There’s a brighter air to the place.

But that bright air stops short at Jean’s mother, slumped in one of the kitchen chairs in a wrinkled dress, gray-blonde hair loose and frazzled around her shoulders and bruise-like shadows beneath her eyes. She watches us come in and doesn’t move from where she’s sitting, slender hands built so much like her son’s trembling around a chipped coffee mug.

Jean stops short in the doorway, a quiet apprehension overtaking him before he stomps it down and paints on a smile, walking into the kitchen and leaning down to press a kiss to the sharp angle of her cheekbone. “Hey, Mom.”

“Jean, what have you done?” she whispers, horrified.

They got to her first. They had to have. Some combination of Smith and Ackerman and the media and probably Eren, if Jean pissed him off enough, they got to her and told her God knows what. It’s hard to make things right when we don’t even know the extent of the damage control we have to do.

“I can explain,” Jean starts, already starting to panic.

“I somehow doubt that.”

Jean just stands there looking lost. He _can_ explain, just not in a way that will make things better, so he settles for silence instead. And it’s not my family, not my place, but I step in anyway, not wanting to watch them fall apart. “Mrs. Kirschtein, ma’am, in all fairness—“

“I’ve got _nothing_ to say to you,” she snaps, pure venom as she whips around and glares at me. This isn’t the sweet lady who took care of me last summer, the one who fussed over me getting enough to eat and called me an angel when I offered to help put icing on Ninette’s birthday cake. She’s a fragile, wasted version of herself, subject to the cornered-animal hostility that only a few people learn to live around when the outlaw life comes knocking.

Jean takes it harder than I do, staggers back like she’s just slapped him instead of yelled at me. “Mom, just listen…”

“No, _you_ listen.” Her voice slips back into that horror-struck waver, raspy and tired. There’s a mostly-empty bottle of brandy sitting on the counter, and Jean’s mother is a tiny lady who probably isn’t used to drinking anything heavier than champagne, although the fact that she only sways a little in her seat as she speaks tells me she’s been practicing. “You can say all you want about your father and how he earned his money, but we never had federal agents coming into our home. They came in here last week saying something about you two shooting up an armory in Oklahoma, and I couldn’t, I _can’t…_ ”

She chokes on the end of her sentence, and it’s enough to wake Jean up. He kneels down next to her chair and takes both her hands in his, pleading with her. “You’ve gotta believe me, the thing in Oklahoma was a frame job. We were set up. That guard that got shot, we didn’t kill him.”

“They had a live witness that could place you at the scene of the crime.”

“We were _there,_ but we didn’t…” He trails off, standing back up and raking a hand through his hair. “It’s complicated, okay? And at this point, the less you know, the better. But we got double-crossed at the armory, and that’s part of what we came back here to tell you.”

“And what about what you _haven’t_ been telling me, Jean? What about this?” Mrs. Kirschtein reaches behind her and grabs a folded newspaper off the counter, spreading it out on the table.

Jean goes stiff as a board.

“Oh shit,” he breathes.

Maybe we’ll never see in ourselves what we see in each other, but it’s close enough to looking in a mirror, watching our own smiling faces staring back at us from the front page of the _Dallas Morning News._ Jean held securely in my arms so close that the intimacy might as well have seeped right into the paper, laughter frozen forever on our lips, the car and the ocean in the background.

 _Several pictures of Kirschtein, 19, and Bodt, 20, were recovered, although some were too indecent to be featured in this publication,_ a caption beneath the photo reads.

And this is how it was bound to go. No reputable newspaper can slap on headlines about the queer criminal duo shooting up the South, but they can imply enough about it that people get the picture and stick with the story, letting them profit off the scandal. I don’t bother reading the article, scanning over a few choice lines about how Jean was a good kid who’s since been tempted to a life of sin and something about him looking delicate in comparison to me. The real problem isn’t in the rumormongering, but in our own faces, grinning up at us in black and white.

The folding camera worked a little too well. They’re crystal clear. Anyone who sees the picture will recognize us from a mile off.

“How did they get that?” I hiss, snatching the paper off the table and trying to find a source for the photos. “Jean, how did they _get_ that?”

He looks like he’s one more revelation from being sick, eyes darting to the floor as he mumbles, “I don’t… I don’t know.”

“D’you see the caption?” his mother asks, and now she’s the one pleading, looking up at her son and begging to be wrong. “What other pictures did they not print? Jean, honey, you’re my baby boy and I want to believe the best of you, but the way they’re making it sound on top of everything else, you running off and even before that, last summer… Are you… Are you two…?”

As if she doesn’t already know.

I don’t say anything because it’s not my place, and Jean doesn’t say anything because he’s too busy breaking in silence, folding in on himself until I barely recognize him. In the space of a few moments, I’m looking at the boy I met last summer, scared and lost and so, so small. His arms curl tight around his chest like he could keep himself from falling apart, breaths scraping up his throat in ragged wheezes as he scans the implication-laced article and his face crumples more with every line. It’s been a long time since I’ve counted my struggles, but standing there and not holding him might be the hardest thing I’ve ever done, maintaining the distance between us just in case he wants to try for a lie that no one in the entire country will believe anymore. The knowledge that Jean is capable of breaking isn’t any newer than the knowledge that I’m capable of breaking myself, but having to watch him try to fight through it on his own comes with a whole new set of demons that I didn’t even know existed. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t need to. The fact that he takes one look at his mother and breaks down crying is enough of an answer.

And as for me, I’m getting ready to grab him and run. The last time something like this happened, I ended up half-dead and homeless, and while there’s not too much of a physical threat involved now, I’ll still haul Jean out of here before the words that will wound him deeper anyway start flying.

Mrs. Kirschtein shuts her eyes, breathing out a sigh of resignation and taking a long drink of whatever’s in her coffee mug. “I see. And did you ever plan on tellin’ me?”

“I was _scared,_ ” he sobs, shoulders shaking under the weight of gasped breaths that hit his lungs with a visible impact. “You’ve seen what happens to people around here when that sort of news gets out and I never planned for it to happen and everything just happened so fast and I was _scared,_ Mom. I’m sorry, I’m sorry I lied to you, but I wasn’t sure what would happen if you knew.”

“Whatever would’ve happened wouldn’t have been as bad as a price on your head and police cars driving by this house all hours of the day and night!” She shouts, rising from her chair, accusation sharp in every word she flings at him. “It wouldn’t have been as bad as me having to pull your sister out of school because she was getting in a fight a day defending an honor her big brother doesn’t have! Look at this mess you’re in, Jean, and look back on the choices you made. Would me knowing then really have been worse than _everyone_ knowing now?”

Jean doesn’t try to defend himself, or even apologize again. He just cries harder. And it’s so fucking unfair, that he has to go through this, that I did, that anyone does. It’s eighteen kinds of fucked-up that his mother should be lecturing him about how stealing is wrong and begging him to come home instead of tearing into him for the fact that he loves me. I learned the hard way a long time ago that most of the human race is shit, but I really wanted to believe that Jean’s mother could somehow manage to be an exception. Disappointment is a weak, disarmed emotion, so I get angry about it instead.

I’m no great judge of character, and right and wrong are hard concepts to define, but it’s _wrong_ that she’s standing there calling me ‘a choice he made’ and asking him what he could have done to make it less shameful.

“Why even ask that question?” I snap, stepping between the two of them and giving her a target that’s a little harder to break. Whatever she wants to call me, it’s nothing I haven’t been called before, and by my own folks at that. My skin’s thick enough to jump in the fray long enough to spit a little poison myself. “Why give him hell over things he can’t change? Even if he would’ve done things differently, there ain’t such a thing as time travel. This is how things are now. And the way things are now, it seems to me that you’re more bitter about how this whole thing looks on what’s left of the family name than you are worried about your son.”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about!”

“Don’t I? I didn’t hear no complaints when the money was good and there was nothin’ scandalous in the papers.”

“Just stop it, Marco,” says Jean, so quiet that I almost don’t hear him.

I turn around and gape at him. “Me?! You’re tellin’ _me_ to—“

“Yes, I am.” He sniffs and swipes his sleeve across his cheeks, trying to remember how to stand tall as he steps around me and stands across the table from his mother. “Listen, we’re gonna be out on the road for a long time, and I can’t call or write, because you could get in trouble for that. I guess if I really need to get ahold of you, I could find a way to send a message through Eren, but—“

“You leave Eren out of this. He’s having enough trouble as it is without getting mixed up with the two of you.” She cuts him off, finishing her drink and reaching behind her to fix another. “If half of what they’re claiming in the papers is true, the bank robberies, the car chases, that dead police officer in Missouri they traced back to you two…”

Jean stops in his tracks, hurt and regret and a million other things welling up in him until he’s paralyzed by them. “That was an accident. We never meant for…”

She takes a step back, slowly shaking her head and whispering, “I don’t know you anymore.”

It’s not _Our son is dead,_ but it has the same effect. I watch Jean shatter, and I’ve never felt more helpless.

It’s a wonder that he’s still standing at all, even more of a wonder that he somehow manages to slap on this wobbly, trembling smile that’s probably more to fool himself than anyone else. He sets the bag he brought with him down on the table, unzipping it to show his mother the stacks of cash inside. “Take this. It’s enough money to take care of you both for a while. Just be careful with it; don’t spend a bunch at once or buy anything conspicuous. I don’t know when I’ll be able to make it back in to give you more, so make sure food and paying off the debts get first priority.”

That bag has every bit of our money in it, and he knows it. But snatching it back won’t keep his sister fed, and starting an argument with him right here and now would probably obliterate him completely, so I bite my tongue, looking out the window and watching the road. “We should get going.”

“Yeah, I know,” Jean nods, turning back to Mrs. Kirschtein with that same false smile. “Where’s Nettie? I wanna say goodbye.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she says, voice and features tight.

Any illusion of something other than brokenness dies on his face, mouth falling open slightly and tears starting to turn his eyes glassy again. “Mom…”

“Wouldn’t want you boys to get off schedule. I’m sure you have places to go.”

“We do, actually. Afternoon, Mrs. Kirschtein.” This is one fight we won’t win, and Jean’s on such uneven ground that another minute in this house will probably crush him. I guide him out the back door and kick it shut behind me, waiting until he’s been sitting in the car for a few minutes without breaking down before saying, “You realize you just gave your mother all of our cash, right?”

“What else was I supposed to do?” His hands ball up into white-knuckled fists in his lap, hurt seeping out of him in waves. “You saw how she reacted.”

“Throwin’ money at someone ain’t gonna change their opinion on something like that, Jean. She’s still a bigot who cares more about her reputation than her kid, but now she’s a bigot _and_ we’re broke.”

“So we do a job. Not exactly a shortage of banks around.”

“Yeah, because moving freely is gonna be real easy from here on out now that our faces are gettin’ hawked by every paper boy on every street corner from here to fuckin’ Albuquerque!” I snap, throwing the paper I brought with me from the house down on the dash. He flinches at the raised volume of my voice, and I backpedal, sinking back in my seat and burying my face in my hands. “How in the _hell_ did they get those pictures? The camera must’ve gotten lost somewhere, fallen into the wrong hands. Just our luck.”

However it happened, we have to compensate for it now. Being in Dallas just got about fifty times more dangerous, and those pictures will probably be nationwide before the end of the week. Nowhere is safe, and we’re facing down the prospect of trying to make our way up the road broke. It’s a bleak outlook at best, a disastrous one at worst.

Jean looks out the windshield at nothing, reaching up to twist his ring around and around until the chain cuts into his neck like a noose. If it hurts, I don’t think he notices. “She wouldn’t even let me say goodbye to my sister.”

We can’t afford for him to break right now. _I_ can’t afford it. Jean’s been the only thing keeping me stable, and if I have to be the one holding him up, we’re both going to crash and burn. I reach over and cradle his face between my hands as gently as I can, turning him around enough to look at me. God, he’s aged five years in five minutes. “Darlin’, you’ve gotta compartmentalize for me, okay? Right now we’ve gotta go get Connie and Sasha and regroup and figure out where we’re gonna get some money. Task at hand.”

He shudders, wrapping his arms around himself again. “I just… the way she looked at me…”

“I know. For what it’s worth, your mother handled it better than mine did.” It comes out sounding angrier than I mean for it to, but the phantom pain across my shoulders steals the would-be apology from my lips. I start the car and pull off into the road instead, driven by the hope that it’s not too late to outrun the shitstorm coming for us. “We need to make tracks before one of those patrols she was talkin’ about comes by.”

Jean’s quiet for the drive back to the old dry cleaners. I don’t try to start a conversation because I know I didn’t want to talk to anyone after I went through that, and he’s too lost to look grateful, twisting and untwisting his necklace, twisting and untwisting.

The only thing I say to him the entire trip is, “Don’t twist the chain like that; it’ll snap.”

The only thing he says to me is, “Sorry.”

“Hey, how’d it go?” Connie asks when he and Sasha pile back in the car, looking a little emotionally frazzled but otherwise none the worse for wear.

I toss the newspaper back into his lap. “Not very well.”

“Shit _fire_ and tarnation.”

“Did you leave that stupid camera in Louisiana? Because when I find out whose fault this is, Connie, I swear to _Christ…_ ” Beside me, Jean goes very pale and starts twisting at his necklace again. He’s been dragged through hell in a matter of minutes, and the worst part of it is that I’m not allowed to let him give into it yet. As soon as we’re out of here, as soon as we’re safe – whenever that is – I’ll let him break down and shake and cry, yell and throw things like I’d want to, like I _did_ when I’d healed up enough from my own trip down the same road. I’ll hold him together until he remembers how to do it himself.

But we can’t do that right now. The only thing I can give him is reaching over and grabbing his hand so he doesn’t snap the chain clean off his neck.

“I don’t remember, man, honest,” says Connie, looking mortified. “This ain’t good, though.”

“Understatement of the goddamn century. We’re about nine different kinds of fucked ‘cause of this. Brand new, crystal-clear pictures of you, Jean, and me in every paper everywhere we go? We won’t be able to stay at a motel without Sasha sneakin’ us in ever again. And forget showing up in public anywhere if it ain’t to do a job. Speaking of which, we need to figure out somewhere we can rob in a timely fashion, because Jean tried to extend the olive branch to his mother in the form of every cent we had.”

“That was real smart! What the hell were you thinkin’?!”

“Shut up, Connie,” Sasha snaps, reaching over her husband to lean up and place a gentle hand on Jean’s shoulder. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you lyin’ to me?”

“Yeah.”

I have to wind back through West Dallas to get on the main road heading North, even more on-edge than before now that I know anyone who looks too closely through the windows of the car will recognize us on sight. “Look, my original plan was to head straight for Kansas, but we can’t do anything with no cash, so—“

“Dallas National Bank,” Jean says, his longest utterance in half an hour.

“What?”

He sucks in a breath, sitting up a bit straighter in his seat. He’s learned the subtle art of making yourself work even when you’re broken to the core, and I’d be proud of him if it didn’t make me so goddamn sad. Jean points up to the next intersection and nods. “It’s downtown, right on Main Street. Huge building, lots of roads in and out.”

With a huge building comes a huge list of potential problems. I consider it for a moment, shaking my head. “Darlin’, we ain’t got the time to case something like that.”

“We don’t have to case it. We don’t have to do the vault or anything, just run in and get the money they have up front, grab-and-dash. I went in there with my dad a few times to help him out with meetings and things. The place is massive, Marco; the money we’d clean out from the tellers’ stations alone could get us by for at least a few weeks.”

The sun rose red today, and our track record hasn’t been great. “I don't know about runnin’ blind into a building I've never even seen.”

“But _I_ know the place,” says Jean, reaching down and placing a hand over mine on the gearshift.

And there it is, against all the odds of the universe. I look at him, and I see his fire still burning, a weak glow of a candle-flame that begs to be fanned to something greater. He’s not okay – as soon as we find somewhere to stop, he’ll cave in and crumble – but neither is he fully broken, my beautiful, stubborn boy, still fighting, still walking into the wind with a spark sheltered in his hands.

I love him. I love him so much more than I can even begin to understand.

“If you're worried that I can't hold it together long enough to get a job done, then we might as well head up the road broke,” he points out, and there’s enough truth to that to bring the job up for reconsideration. “We'll be in and out in less than ten minutes.”

I curse under my breath and take a hard right at the intersection. “Don't have much of a choice do we? All right, let's do it.”

Downtown Dallas is a maze of alleyways and roads, but that’s a good thing. Lots of roads mean lots of escape routes, and I take a mental note of every one I see as we start down main street, passing under the long shadows of tall buildings and glamorous storefronts.

“That's the place right there.” Dallas National Bank is a towering feat of architecture with polished brass doors and gleaming plate glass windows, shining even from halfway up the road. It’s situated around intersections and spaces between buildings, cars whizzing past in dizzying patterns that actually make me feel a little optimistic.

“Okay, alleys and side roads, that's good. I don't wanna park,” I nod, glancing over my shoulder into the backseat. “Connie, you and Sasha take the car and circle around. Jean and I'll go in, do the job, run out with the cash and jump in, and then we'll all get the hell outta here as fast as we can.”

“We takin’ the big guns?” Jean asks. The BARs from Oklahoma are shoved under the front seat for easy access, but we haven’t touched them yet.

I think back to the disaster in Missouri, to blood on pavement and the sleepless nights that followed. That bank is full of innocent people, but it’s also a big job, and it’s no new information that big jobs need big guns. I swallow hard, tell myself that we can keep the situation under control. In and out, no one gets hurt. “We probably should. Just—“

“Keep a steady trigger finger. I know. Okay, pull up at this door right here. We'll run in and Connie can hop in the driver’s seat.”

I slide over next to Jean, pulling the guns up from under the seat and handing one to him. “Three weeks since the last job, probably a month since we did a bank. We'll be rusty.”

He shakes his head, drumming his fingers against the door “Nah, we still got it.”

“I hope you're right,” I hum, tracking the timing of people moving in and out of the lobby.

“Hey, baby.”

“Hm?”

“Wanna know a secret?”

“Lay it on me.”

Jean laughs, a nervous, trilling sound that bounces around the inside of the car. “I've got no earthly idea how to shoot this thing.”

I lean over and kiss him, don’t pull back until I feel some of the tension loosen at the base of his neck. “I'd be scared, but you do some of your best work under those conditions.”

“Okay, I'm ready when y'all are,” says Connie, pulling the driver’s side door shut behind him.

“Quick and simple, right? Nothin’ flashy?” asks Jean, scratching at the back of his head until his hair’s an unholy blond mess.

“I never said nothin’ flashy,” I grin, clicking the safety off on the BAR and pulling my hat on a little tighter. “Our showmanship’s our trademark, darlin’. Gotta give these good people their money’s worth.”

Connie rolls his eyes and revs the engine. “Get outta the car and try not to get yourselves killed, would you?”

He waits for my nod before flinging the door open, and we bust into the lobby at a full-out run. My first time firing a Browning Automatic Rifle is a spray of warning shots into the ceiling, and I nearly knock myself over in the process. The thing’s got a kick like a goddamn rodeo bull, and a rain of plaster dust comes down on both our heads, chalky and choking. I could swear that Jean rolls his eyes as he flips the lock on the door behind us. Not the smoothest entrance, but we still get a few good screams before the desired silence. I just have to make sure to brush the plaster off my head before jumping up on one of the heavy tables stretching out along the marble-floored lobby.

“Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen! Hands in the air if you please!” Instant compliance. First fucking thing that’s gone right all day. If getting what you wanted out of life was this easy, I’d hold the whole world at gunpoint. “Thank you. If everyone remains calm and cooperates, this’ll be over in no time and y’all can go about your day without any further interruptions. Anyone gets in a fuss or tries to be a hero; I unfortunately can’t make the same promise. Now, I got no desire to make a mess of this fine establishment. Do you, Jean?”

“No desire at all,” he calls back from where he’s got a gun on the row of teller’s stations, making sure that no one’s reaching for an alarm.

A few heads perk up at Jean’s name, looking back and forth between us, and I don’t bother fighting back a smirk. Infamy has its benefits. “So if y’all don’t mind, we’ll just be makin’ a little withdrawal, after which we’ll be on our way.”

“Tellers, hands on the counter, please,” Jean instructs the people on his half of the bank, shrugging an empty duffel bag off his shoulder. “Everyone else proceed in an orderly fashion to the back of the lobby. I’m gonna come on down the line with this bag, and I’d very much appreciate it if each one of y’all could empty your till into it before headin’ to see my associate over there.”

“Associate?” I laugh.

He stops halfway through sticking up the first teller in line, a young girl who’s probably not even out of high school yet, and tilts his head to the side, a small, tentative smile playing at the corners of his lips. “Guess I don’t have to call you that anymore, huh? The cat being outta the bag has some benefits after all.”

The teller’s eyes go wide as dinner plates, her jaw dropping as she dumps her till into the bag. “You’re them, ain’t you? Those boys from the newspaper?”

“The very same,” Jean nods, leaning against the counter. “Bet you get to meet all kinds of interesting people in this line of work, huh?”

“Think y’all could gimme an autograph before you run for it?”

He breaks out into a full-blown grin this time, not looking over his shoulder but calling out, “Marco! You hear that?”

“Maybe next time, doll,” I holler back across the lobby, herding the patrons into one corner. “We’re in a bit of a rush.”

“Sorry to disappoint. If you could just step over there, Miss. And now…” Jean stops. Blinks. Completely abandons robbery protocol to turn around and stare at me. “What the hell is that?”

A weird noise rises up from outside, muffled through the windows, an ominous, nerve-grating caterwauling that blends into one long, discordant whine. I run over to the door and look outside long enough to figure out the source – sirens, lots of them, approaching from both sides of Main Street – before turning back to Jean, a cold dread dropping hard into my gut.

“That’s an ambush.”

_“What?”_

“Those feds knew we were comin’ to Dallas. They’ve probably had a tail on us since we left your house.” Cursing under my breath, I reach over and haul him behind the nearest counter. Around us, the bank erupts into chaos, people tripping over themselves to get out before they end up on the unfortunate end of a hostage situation. The sirens grow louder, a look of pure terror settles on Jean’s face, and I have to grab him by his shoulders and shake him to bring him back to the present. “We need to get outta here.”

Not through the front door, that’s for damn sure. Too clogged with terrified civilians, and by the time we got out, we’d be walking straight into a firing squad.

“I remember…” Jean clutches at his hair, eyes screwing shut. “I think I remember something from the last time I was here with Dad. There’s a door back by the conference rooms that spits out onto Commerce Street. I snuck out while he was in a meeting to go meet Eren for sodas at the corner shop.”

Works for me. “Do you remember how to get there?”

“I don’t…”

_“Jean!”_

He sucks in a deep breath – in, out, in again – and nods, pointing at the opposite corner of the lobby where a heavy mahogany door stands open to a plush, carpeted hallway. “Yeah. Yeah, I think I can. We go back through there.”

“Okay, go.” Picking his gun up off the floor and handing it to him, I give him a nudge out into the lobby.

He looks down the abandoned row of tellers’ stations, frowning at the paltry stacks of cash sitting in his bag. “But the money—“

“Forget the money and _go!_ ” I growl, grabbing him by the shirt collar and hauling him across the cavernous room. Our footsteps echo across the floor in syncopation with our frantic heartbeats, and somewhere in the mix there’s the sound of something metallic falling and hitting the marble, but I don’t think anything of it, too powered by fear and urgency to have any other goal than diving headlong down the hallway, past the closed doors of conference rooms.

Jean screeches to a halt halfway to the corner, a hand coming up over his sternum. His eyes widen to panicked disks of amber, breath leaving him in a terrified wheeze of, _“Oh shit!”_

“What?” I ask, afraid that we’re in the wrong hallway or something. By now, there’s no time to go find the right one.

“My ring. I dropped my ring. The chain snapped.”

“Don’t you _dare_ – Jean!” but he’s already gone, down the hall and disappearing around the corner, back into the lobby.

And me, being the massive, illogical, lovestruck idiot that I am – I run right after him.

The lights of the police cars dapple the lobby blue and red, but Jean acts like he doesn’t even see them, throwing himself down on the floor after his lost ring. I catch up to him just as he grabs it, skidding to a stop between him and the window and hauling him to his feet, shouting, “Are you outta your goddamn _mind?!_ ”

“I couldn’t leave it,” he gasps, the chain clutched between his fingers. “I couldn’t.”

I chance a look out the window just to see if I can figure out how fucked we are. Cop cars as far as my panicked eyes can see, and twenty yards away, Levi Ackerman is getting out of a Ford V8 with a pistol in his hand.

The answer to my question is “very, very fucked.”

“Gonna get yourself killed over a piece of jewelry.” I hiss, grabbing the ring from Jean and shoving him back toward the hallway. Now go, before they—“

The world explodes.

There’s a sound like thunder and then a sound like wind chimes and then _pain,_ hot and vicious, ripping through me like lightning. I think I fall. I fall for a long time, until everything is far away, and somewhere in the distance someone is screaming. It takes a second to realize that it’s me.

_“Oh God. Oh my God. Marco? Marco!”_

There’s nothing. There’s nothing but the pain and Jean’s voice somewhere in there, along with the sensation of something wet and hot everywhere, under me, around me, clogging up my nose and my mouth until I’m choking on it. My old man used to say that if you didn’t bleed for something, then you hadn’t worked hard enough to deserve it. Through my own screams and the sticky wetness coating my skin and my shirt, I wonder if I deserve Jean yet.

 _“Shit, shit, c’mon, we gotta move, baby, we – oh_ God _– we’ve gotta go…”_

I’ve been fighting for a long damn time. When you fight as much as I do, you get hurt a lot. I’m no stranger to pain, but this is on a whole new level, so violent that I can’t even source it, so excruciating that it burrows into my brain and plants a bloom of blackness there. I scream some more, and then it swallows me.

_“What the hell happened?!”_

My demons are ugly things. The creatures that haunt my nightmares, they look a lot like warped versions of places and people I’ve left behind. I’m in the farmhouse in Telico but I’m not _(but I am)_ and everything hurts and I’ve never been so afraid and I don’t remember screaming for my mother but maybe that’s just my mind coming up with new ways to fuck with me.

_“They shot the window out. We shouldn’t have even been in there, but I ran back in and Marco came after me and got between me and the window, it’s my fault, it’s all my fault…”_

That doesn’t sound like Bible verses or my father but the agony sure as hell feels like it, deconstructing me bit by bit and there I go screaming for my mother again and begging for it to stop and when I look up at the ghost in my head that’s supposed to be her she looks down and says _“Sweet Jesus, that’s a lotta blood.”_

I scream until my lungs give out and cry after they do and nothing makes it stop hurting and nothing makes sense because there are no roaring engines in a farmhouse in Telico and no one there ever sobbed that they loved me over and over again until it mixed in with the cries of pain and sounded almost pretty, I was always alone there—

I was always—

Alone.

_“We can’t take it out, he’ll bleed out and be dead in ten minutes!”_

_“He’s got a six-inch shard of glass stickin’ outta his goddamn_ eye, _Jean, he’s just as dead if we leave it sit there!”_

I’m trapped in a maelstrom of my own pain that only spirals down and I hear everything but none of it makes sense and the screaming is just whimpering now and everything is gray and fading in and out, disjointed, and it would be so easy just to stop now.

It would be so easy to not have to fight anymore.

_“…cauterize it, and he might survive… hold him…”_

Clarity returns in one final, exquisite, miserable burst, pain roaring down my whole body and blood-slick hands pressed to the sides of my head. I can only see part of Connie, the rest of him bloody blackness, something blurred and red-hot clutched in his hand. But what grounds me is Jean, sobbing even as he holds me still, tears cutting pink tracks through the blood smeared across his cheeks.

“…-rry, I’m so sorry, I love you. Don’t you quit on me, okay? Don’t leave me. Please pass out, please pass out, oh God, please pass out.”

It would be so easy not to have to fight anymore, but I’ve still got something to fight for.

Connie looms back over me with the glow in his hand. A sharp jerk, a hiss, a smell like cooking meat, pain that makes what I’ve been fighting look easy, and then everything goes black again.


	22. Jean

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please listen to [the atsit!eren mix that will make you hate me forever](http://8tracks.com/southspinner/so-do-i) while reading _that scene._
> 
> warnings for graphic descriptions of wounds and puking.
> 
> i have a [tumblr.](http://southspinner.tumblr.com)

“He’s still bleedin’ pretty bad,” says Connie.

It takes a while for it to sink in. I’m no longer fully in my own head, running on impulse, following orders when they’re given, staring straight ahead and focusing on cracks in the wall so I don’t have to think, don’t have to think…

And I _can’t_ think about it, can’t think about how my hands have grown so covered in blood that it pools blackish-red in the crevices of my knuckles, sticks my fingers together like hot, tacky glue and makes me clumsy in a situation where I can’t afford to be. I can’t think about all that violent crimson soaking into the floorboards beneath my knees, because it’ll only take me back to different blood on a different floor on the morning everything came crashing down around me. If I go back there now, I’ll be useless.

I can’t watch love die with the same grace that my mother did. She stayed upright for years afterwards. Marco’s still breathing (and bleeding), and I’m already falling apart.

“We can… If we can just keep pressure, we can…” I wheeze. Cracks on the wall. No more sunlight under the door.

He’s dying, and it’s my fault.

There’s no way around reality anymore, not when it’s bleeding out beneath my desperate hands. I wanted so badly to live in the little fantasy Marco and I had crafted for ourselves that I ignored what the rest of the world would have to say about it, got too brave too fast, cost us everything in the name of one grand, stupid gesture. The little rush of victory I felt as we were driving away from Lufkin wasn’t worth watching my own mother looking at me like I was a stranger, and it wasn’t worth _this._

There’s nothing in the world that’s worth Marco unconscious on a bloody, dusty floor, the ruin that I caused thrown into shadowed relief by two kerosene lanterns that Sasha found sitting in the barn’s otherwise empty hayloft. I don’t look. I can’t look.

Cracks on the wall. Shadows on the floor. A glimmer between Marco’s fingers. My ring, the citrine spotted and dulled with blood.

All this time spent feeling like Alice, lost and feeling sorry for myself, I never knew how good I had it. Being Icarus is ten times worse, plummeting down under the momentum of my own idiotic pride and watching everything I’ve ever wanted disappear beneath scarlet waves.

Connie ducks into my field of view, dried blood smeared across his forehead, eyes dark with fatigue and worry. “That’ll only help so much, man; some of these need stitches.”

“What am I supposed to do?!” I choke. I wish I knew. I really do. If there was something I could do to go back and make none of this happen, some switch I could throw to turn back the clock until it was just me and Marco on the beach in Louisiana again, I’d do it. I’d go back and find my peace and never wish for anything but stagnancy again. I don’t want life beyond other people’s boundaries anymore. Not if this is the price.

“I don’t know, but it don’t look too good right now!”

I make the mistake of looking at the mess I’ve made, and it undoes me.

For the most part, I’ve been holding pressure and passing towels and praying for this all to be a nightmare while Connie and Sasha have done any real medical work, my hands shaking too badly to be given anything important - we’ve already seen where Marco ends up when people trust me with him. Up until now, it’s been automatic motions and the cracks in the wall, and I haven’t had to see, haven’t had to face what’s happened to him because of me.

We had no time and no tools for a delicate procedure. What we had was Marco bleeding more than any human should, materials for a fire, and Connie’s Bowie knife rattling around somewhere in the back of the Dodge. The result was more devastation than salvation.

There was never any saving the eye, not with a shard of glass the length of my hand sticking out of it, blood everywhere, all over the car and Marco and me as the sirens faded behind us and I tried to fight through the panic long enough to figure out what to do. Cutting it out and cauterizing it was the only option we had, but Connie’s no surgeon and it shows. The right side of Marco’s face is a mess of messily seared-shut wounds, the skin scalded and warped from beneath his eyebrow all the way down to his jawline. Connie must have tried to seal what he could while the knife was still hot.

I remember Marco smiling, the waves lapping up around his ankles. He was so beautiful.

He jerks hard beneath my trembling hands and stills again. He’s done it a few times before, skirting close to consciousness before his body decides that he can’t do it and he passes out again. The blood loss is winning, the result of all the shrapnel wounds scattered down his neck and torso, shallow nicks and deep furrows that have gone from gushing terrifying amounts of blood to even more terrifying trickles. His arm tenses, cold beneath my sticky fingers, and goes lax. I wonder when the cycle will give out along with the rest of him and his heart will stop. Something stills in my own chest at the thought.

“I… I can’t…” I wheeze, rocking back on my heels and trying to bite back the sting of bile rising to coat the back of my tongue. Sasha darts right in to hold pressure on the towel I let go of, watching me as I stand and sway on my feet and end up once again in the middle of the wreckage of everything I ever loved. The punch it packs is so much harder when it’s a consequence of my own mistakes.

The air in the barn is close and humid and smells like death. I feel like it’s crawling down my throat, and I only make it a few more seconds before my stomach gives a resigned churn and I lunge past Connie for the door, yanking it open and diving out into the arid night.

“Jean!” he yells, but it’s lost in the rattling slam of the door behind me. Any fear of being spotted is outweighed by the urgency of staggering a few feet away from the barn and throwing up everything I’ve eaten since yesterday, blinking back tears and trying to fight the pain in my stomach when I start dry heaving, my body in full revolt as it tries to purge something that’s not there.

And right here, right now, I almost don’t care about staying hidden anymore. In the blind horror of the disaster at the bank, Connie flooring the gas pedal and screaming that we had to get Marco somewhere that we could get him laid out to take care of him, I guided him along with my gut instinct, followed my memories to the one place I’ve always felt safe. I’m a little too far gone to remember that I’ve ruined this too, so lost that the porch light clicking on across the dusty barnyard almost looks like home, so desperate for someone to take these broken things I’ve wrecked and make them whole again that the silhouette drawing closer could almost be a saving grace.

“Jean?” Eren can’t recognize me in the dark until he’s close enough to see the state I’m in, panic sparking across his face as he breaks into a run to close the distance between us. “Oh my God!”

When I begged Marco to come back to Dallas, it was for the chance to apologize to Eren, for us to have a long, awkward moment and stiff apologies and a mutual acknowledgement that things would probably never be the same again. Simple, clean, what he deserved. This is complicated and dirty and something that _no one_ deserves, the two of us standing outside his barn at God knows what hour of the night, no explanations and even less hope. And there’s no awkward moment. There’s just a pause. I look at him and sway on my feet again. He puts out a hand to steady me.

And I collapse into his arms and _sob._

He holds me up like I don’t weigh anything at all, and I hate myself for being relieved at finally giving into the luxury of breaking. I did it because I knew I could. I’ve always known that Eren makes for a wonderful crutch, and such a willing one at that. I’ve put him through hell, and here we are again, my whole body trembling, face buried in the crook of his neck and voice hitching around frantic pleas for absolution. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I didn’t know where else to go.”

“I saw a light in the barn and came out to check on it.” His arms tighten around me for a second, and then he pulls back, looking me over, more horror-struck by the second. “Are you all right? Jesus Christ, you’re covered in blood… what happened?”

“We tried to…” I’m just blubbering by this point, incoherent and fighting a losing war to breathe. “It was my fault, it was all my fault, I shouldn’t have gone back…”

His palms settle on the sides of my face, holding my focus long enough to make me listen to him, voice calm and slow even through the apprehension coiled tight beneath it. “Jean. Hey. Tell me what happened and I’ll fix it, but I need you to talk to me.”

Sucking in a decent gasp of air takes a full minute. I have to listen to Eren breathe and try to time my breaths with his to even make the attempt, words cracking under the onslaught of fighting their way up my tightened throat. “Job went bad. Cops everywhere. I ran back to get something and they shot the window out and Marco… Marco…”

No use. I start sobbing again.

Eren’s jaw clenches. “Is he alive?”

“H-he was standing in front of me, c-caught all the shrapnel from the window. Big shard of glass in his eye. There was so much blood. So much b-blood... We were afraid he was g-gonna bleed out.” It’s barely intelligible, but the more I talk, the easier the words come, flowing faster and faster until I can’t stop them anymore, tear-laced and scared. “Had to take the eye to cauterize it and stop the bleeding, but there are other cuts and there are burns and it’s bad, Eren, it’s so bad, I can’t lose him, I can’t, I—“

“You’re not gonna lose him if you stay calm and let me help,” he says, like that’s that. And God help me, I believe him.

Marco was always the one who said that trusting people had a way of coming back to bite you in the ass, but trusting Eren to work his magic and take horrible things and make them okay is the only reason I’ve made it this far. If he can do it one more time - just this once, I promise myself, _just this once_ \- then maybe we can finally have our great catharsis. I can acknowledge that I’m horrible, he can realize that he’s always deserved better anyway, and the world can keep on turning. I just need one last miracle. One more trumpet rescued from a locked band room, one more bloody, scarred nose on my behalf.

(But it’s always “just one more,” isn’t it? That’s how it always starts.)

“Okay. Okay, we’ve got him in here, but it’s really bad.” I nod, leading him over to the door. The long hours and frayed nerves haven’t done well for anyone, which might have some part in explaining why Connie has a gun on Eren in less than a second, but it would be nice to not have to worry about anyone else dying. A little too frazzled to think about the safety hazard; I scowl at him and smack his shoulder. “Hey, no, it’s fine! He’s here to help.”

Now that he’s no longer in danger of being shot, Eren looks down at Marco and whispers, “Oh, God Almighty.”

“You a miracle worker?” Connie asks, clicking the safety of his gun back on and holstering it. “‘Cause that’s about the only help that’ll do any good right now.”

Eren shakes his head, looking from Marco to Connie to me. “This is over my head, man. I don't know how to fix this. I've gotta go get Mikasa.”

“No. We can't bring her into this, too. There's already enough people in danger ‘cause of me, we can't—“

“Jean, _look at me._ ” I’m fragile, but not in such a way that I’ll benefit from someone treating me gently. Eren knows this, and knows I won’t hold it against him later for grabbing me by the shoulders and giving me a little shake to bring me back to my senses.“He is going to _die_ if you don’t let me go get my sister. Is that what you want?”

What I want is a do-over, or better yet, a never-do. I want a whole other existence where none of this was ever necessary, the blood and the fear and the constant running. I want a life where I never broke my mother’s heart, or Eren’s, or anyone else’s. I want my Wonderland if not my story-book ending, some sort of happiness that I forgot somewhere along the way. I want a chance to do things better, to _be_ better, to maybe for once in my fucking life get something right.

But I’ll settle for Marco not dying. I’ll never get any of those other things, but if there’s the smallest hope of Marco not dying, I’ll take it.

“Go get her.”

Eren disappears out the door of the barn in a slam and a cloud of dust, leaving the rest of us in a tense silence that sits heavy in the blood-soaked air.

“You really wanna drag more people into this shitshow?” Connie asks after a moment.

“Mikasa’s a nurse. She’ll be able to help him more than the rest of us combined.”

“Yeah, but—“

I sink back down to the floor beside Marco, pressing a careful hand to the unscathed side of his face. The pulse point at the hinge of his jaw flutters weakly beneath my fingers. It’s enough hope for me to grit my teeth and hold onto. “I’d sell my soul at this point, Connie. Don’t ask me what I’d do if it means keepin’ him alive, ‘cause it’s a damn long list.”

When the door slides open again, the cavalry’s arrived in the form of a sharp-eyed Mikasa, in command from the moment she crosses the threshold. She still manages to look put together even in her pajamas, bathrobe tied neat and tight around her waist, delicate hands sweeping her hair up into a high bun at the crown of her head that she ties off with a length of worn ribbon. She takes the situation in with one sweeping gaze. Her eyes stop on Marco. She winces.

Holy shit, it’s bad. It’s really bad.

She reels herself back into composure, though, swallows hard and rolls her shoulders as Eren edges in behind her with a basin of water and a huge leather duffel bag slung over his shoulder. I don’t know how I ended up the spokesperson in this situation, but I’m the one she talks to. “How long have y'all been here?”

“A while,” I rasp out, “I think. I'm not sure what time it was when we got here. Sun was still up.”

Humming her assent, Mikasa moves to kneel beside me, paying no mind to the way the blood on the floor soaks up through her nightgown and paints rusty streaks up her shins to her knees. She’s more interested in finding out what she’s dealing with, rolling her sleeves up to her elbows and taking the bar of soap Eren hands her to wash up in the basin before gently tilting Marco’s head to get a better look at the damage. The cavity where his right eye used to be is a gruesome disaster, all mutilated flesh and sunken shadows, congealed blood flecked across the warped skin of his cheek like the freckles that have since been scarred away. Mikasa winces again. “For the love of… tell me you sanitized your instruments.”

“We had clean towels,” says Connie. “And I doused the knife in alcohol and got it pretty hot.”

She clicks her tongue against the backs of her teeth, frowning down at the bloody rags we’ve been using as makeshift pressure bandages and peeling them back to get a better look. “The eye’s cauterized, so infection hopefully won't be an issue there. All these other cuts…”

“From the shrapnel. Far as I can tell, we were able to get all the glass out.”

“I can stitch those, but I'm worried about those burns. What'd you work with, a damn machete?”

“Bowie knife,” he huffs, stained arms crossing over his chest. “Didn't have the best selection.”

Mikasa’s having none of his excuses, looking at him coolly over the bottles and rolls of bandages she’s pulling from the bag that Eren hauled in. “Even if they don't get infected, that part of his face won't heal well. It'll all scar.”

Connie has the decency to look a little more grateful and mumbles, “I think we’re all more concerned with him bein’ alive than with how pretty he’ll be.”

Before today, I knew every scar on Marco’s body. We spent so many nights in a roulette wheel of motel rooms and rented vacation spots that I found my solidity in tracing the raised lines between his shoulderblades and down his spine. I familiarized myself with every inch of his skin by force of habit alone, learned how to map out the ridges and valleys by feel and memory.

He’ll have so many new ones now that they’ll be impossible to count, much less memorize. All those scars, and every one my fault. I think of the unopened letters still hidden in the lid of my trumpet case, my own unspoken cross to bear, and the weight just gets heavier. Mikasa starts getting ready to treat him, and I start bargaining with God. Just let him make it through this, let him live, and I’ll learn every scar by heart. I don’t care how long it takes. I’ll take the full taxonomy of all the wrong I’ve done and hold it close until my last day, just let him live.

But God probably doesn’t have much interest in listening to me after all the shit I’ve done to piss Him off. If I should be praying to anyone, it should be the woman beside me, contemplative and calm as she tries to fix the wreckage of everything I have left.

“What’s his status?” Mikasa asks, earning blank looks from everyone. Remembering that she’s not surrounded by a competent support staff, she rolls her eyes and restates, “Has he woken up?”

She’s looking at me, but I’m too close to breaking down in fucking tears again to answer, so Connie comes to my rescue. “A couple times, but it’s usually real quick. He’ll open his eye, jerk around a bit, and pass out again.”

“His body’s shutting him down over and over so it doesn’t have to process the pain.” For every revelation she hears, she just looks more grim, bending down and batting my hand out of the way to check Marco’s pulse. “It’s trying to keep all its channels open to heal and fight infection, but he’ll need stitches, bandages, medicine… If y’all hadn’t gotten me, he wouldn’t have lasted the night.”

I look up at Eren, who’s still hovering in the door, uncertain of what to do. Without help, Marco would have been dead by morning. One last miracle.

Eren looks down at the floor with an expression of vague horror and says, “I think he's waking up again.”

Marco gives a little twitch, a low, pained moan gurgling in the back of his throat. Mikasa curses more colorfully than I’ve ever heard her and braces her hand against the good side of his face, nodding at nothing. It’s apparently a summons, because Eren lunges out of the doorway and over to help, pulling bottles and gauze pads out of the bag with the steadiest hands out of anyone in the room.

He pops the stopper on one of the bottles, and a heady, chemical odor hangs in the barn, something that smells like doctor’s offices and getting my tonsils out when I was a little kid. Mikasa pulls the neck of her nightgown up over her nose and takes the soaked pad from Eren, sparing the rest of us a rushed explanation. “If he regains full consciousness, it won't be good. He’s lost so much blood that he’s in hypovolemic shock. Waking up right now could kill him. I’ve got some morphine and burn medicine for later, but I’m going to use a little bit chloroform and keep him under for now so he stays still.”

“Why do you have morphine and burn medicine at your house?” Sasha asks, breaking her long silence from where she’s retreated to stand in the shadow of the parked car.

“With the way the economy’s been, most folks can’t afford medical treatment when they need it. Luckily for Marco, the hospital’s not gonna miss a few bottles and blood transfusion supplies here and there,” Mikasa mutters, like the fact that she’s apparently been stealing medical supplies and running a clandestine charity hospital while I’ve been out robbing banks is some kind of afterthought. “Eren, I need you over here to keep his head steady.”

Eren answers his sister with a sharp nod, kneeling down and replacing Mikasa’s hand with his own to brace Marco’s head against any movement. Marco twitches again, his good eye fluttering open for a second before Mikasa presses the chloroform-soaked cloth over his nose and mouth, and as he sinks back into unconsciousness, Eren whispers, “You do _not_ get to die, you hear me? He gave up _everything_ for you, you bastard; you don’t get to die.”

I didn’t give up everything for him. Saying that I gave up everything implies some sort of great sacrifice, and I’m not the one lying on a dirty floor bleeding to death. I didn’t give up everything so much as I willingly cast it into the wind, threw my fate up in the air and dared the world to come get me. It got Marco instead, which might be some sort of horrible, karmic solution to make us atone for everything we’ve done together. Hurting him on my account is a greater punishment than getting hurt myself ever could have been, and maybe the universe or God or whoever knew that when it put him in in the line of fire, begging me to leave my foolish sentiment behind and run. Maybe that’s the moral in all of this.

If it is, we’re doomed. Leaving my sentiment behind isn’t possible, not when it comes to him. I’ll either take Marco and run, or I’ll be the one to stand in front of the goddamn window next time.

“Jean, come over here and get a towel ready to keep pressure; those facial wounds are gonna bleed like no one’s business.” Mikasa’s busy threading a surgical needle with practiced precision, barely flicks her eyes upwards long enough to look at me. “Jean?”

I’m held to the floor by the leaden weight of the albatross around my neck – although for the sake of the metaphor making more sense, you could call it the strap of a folding camera – watching these people I’ve known my whole life putting everything on the line for the man who took me from them, heart and soul, with no apologies from either of us. I’m no better than my father, racking up debts I’ll never stand a chance of repaying.

But Mikasa, along with the rest of the world, has no time for my sentiment. She’s in that her-and-the-patient zone now, and my numb edge of hysteria makes me just on the cluttered side of useless to her. “Jean! If you’re in no shape to help, then clear out!”

The only thing that saves me from shaking apart at the seams is a small palm pressed firm and steady between my shoulders, strength behind it that you wouldn’t expect. Sasha stays with me until I’ve grappled with the parts of myself that want to collapse and won enough victories to keep my footing, only leaving my side to go dip one of our last clean towels in the basin of water before she comes back and takes my bloodstained hand in hers.

“Come on, sugar, let’s get you some fresh air,” she whispers, guiding me out the door and into the dry darkness of the barnyard. Eren’s porch light gleams like the beacon of a distant shore, but I’m nowhere near strong enough to make it that far, collapsing to the dusty ground and fighting through shaking, sobbing gasps. Sasha kneels beside me, peels my fingers away from their fisted knots in my hair. “Deep breaths, nice and easy.”

I shake my head once. I’ll never breathe easy again. “I’ve as good as killed him.”

Something damp and cool brushes my arm, making me jump, but Sasha just works right through it, wiping the dirt and congealed blood off my hands with quiet diligence. “No you haven’t. Don’t think like that.”

If it was as easy as _don’t think like that,_ half of our problems never would have happened. Maybe Sasha’s learned how to do it, writing off the things she can’t change as the last measure of holding onto her sanity, but my fears and guilty thoughts are a little more stubborn. They don’t go away just because I tell them to. God knows I’ve tried. No matter how hard or far I run, they always find a way to catch up.

“If I hadn’t gone back, we wouldn’t have been in front of the damn window in the first place. And if he hadn’t run after me…” I gulp in ragged wheezes of still air, giving voice to the one thing that’s been screaming through every cell of me since I pulled Marco out of the bank. “I should’ve been the one standing there. It should’ve been me.”

It should’ve been me. I should’ve been the one with the chance to pay my debts in blood and make an end to it, not Marco. The difference is that with me gone, Marco could have picked himself up and kept running. If he dies, I’ll be broken down in the middle of an open road, directionless, too broken to go forward and unable to travel back over all the bridges I’ve burned.

“If you start layin’ all this blame on yourself, the only thing it’s gonna do is tear you apart,” Sasha says, like I’m not already ripped to shreds. “It ain’t gonna help Marco.”

“If he dies, it’ll be my fault.” It comes out almost like a plea, begging for her, for _someone_ to understand. I’ve never been able to come to terms with the idea of someone’s death on my hands, and when that someone is Marco… “I can’t just put that outta mind.”

The only sources of light are the distant glow of Eren’s porch and the lantern light that leaks under the door of the barn, but the moon lights up the sad angle of her smile as she reaches up with the wet cloth to clean the rusty stains from my forehead and cheeks. “That man is not gonna let himself be taken out by a few shards of glass. It’s too anticlimactic for him to accept it. He’s in there fightin’, Jean, and he’s gonna come through it.”

“But what if—“

“There is no ‘what if.’ He’s gonna make it.” She says it in that no-nonsense voice of hers, the one she uses when Connie’s in the dog house or when one of us has gotten on her bad side. It doesn’t leave room for arguments.

It’s the closest thing to certainty I have right now, and I accept it with gratitude, slumping back against the wall and breathing out, “Thanks, Sasha.”

She shrugs it off, a silent _don’t mention it,_ and wipes the last traces of red from my skin. “You gonna be okay?”

“No.”

Sasha sighs out around a prayer for patience, leaning down and pressing her lips to my forehead. “Mikasa said she needed more water. I’m gonna run over to Eren’s house and get some. Just remember to breathe, sugar. It’s gonna be okay.”

She takes off across the yard, darting through the shadows so no one looking out the windows of the big house could see her, and I’m left alone. Seconds pass like hours, and the longer I’m left with my own guilt and loss to echo off the inside of my skull, the more violent the noise becomes. I miss Sasha coming back because when and if she does, I’m already curled into a ball, forehead pressed to my knees, heartbeat roaring along with the screech of all my could-have-beens and should-have-dones in my ears.

I don’t know how long I stay like that, but after a while, the overload gets to be too much and I just go numb. I don’t think of the grave murmurs and clinking of bottles on the other side of the door. I don’t think of Marco, or Eren, or my mother. I don’t think of anything but the slow in-and-out of my ribcage against my arms wrapped around it. It’s not peace, but floating in a void is better than screaming your way through a flaming nosedive and praying for the sweet release of hitting the ground at full speed. I sit curled up against the wall of the barn, and I don’t dwell on anything, and I lose track of time. I think I might sleep for a while, pulled down by sheer mental and physical exhaustion. All I know is that when the door slides open and I finally look up, the moon’s moved much farther across the sky.

“Marco’s damn lucky he’s type A and I’m feelin’ generous,” Eren gripes, rubbing at a length of bandage wound around the crook of his elbow as he folds himself down on the ground beside me. His normally tanned complexion seems pale, and his fingers tremble around the cigarette he pulls out of his shirt pocket. “Mikasa thinks he’s gonna make it.”

When I was thirteen, Eren bled for me, still has the scar to prove it. Now he’s done it again, to save someone who never would have been hurt at all if it weren’t for my mistakes. Maybe that’s just what I was put on this earth for. To leave scars on people.

My numbness shatters, and I curl back into myself with a whimper.

Eren frowns, nudges at my shoulder until I look at him. “Hey, why the fuss, ain’t that good news? He’s okay.”

“He’s not okay; his goddamn _eye is gone_ and it’s my fault.”

“Jean—“

“No!” My voice cracks, and I don’t sound half as firm as I want to. “Everyone’s tellin’ me not to blame myself, but you all know it’s true! I was the one who ran back. I was the one who convinced him to do the job. I was the one who wanted to come to Dallas in the first place, and I’m the reason our pictures are all over the fuckin’ country.”

He blinks at me, unsteady hands struggling with a match for a minute before he finally gives up and sticks the unlit cigarette behind his ear for safekeeping. “How are those pictures your fault?”

“We had a run-in with those agents that have been tailing us yesterday. I had the camera in my bag, and I…” I clench my teeth, bracing for the impact of his disappointment, or his anger, whatever he’s going to throw at me that’s so much less than what he probably should. “I don’t even know why I did it, I just _left_ it there, thought I was makin’ some kinda statement.”

“Oh for fuck’s _sake,_ Jean.” Eren groans, letting his head fall back against the wall, taking a moment to let the gravity of it sink in before his temper finds its traction and he snaps back up, eyes narrowing and rebuke harsh. “Are you touched in the head?!”

“I didn’t think they’d put ‘em in the newspaper! The idea of that kinda thing going public, it…”

“It’s a scandal, and it’ll make people buy papers, which is exactly _why_ they ended up in the newspaper!” he snaps, raking a hand through his hair and growling something under his breath about how my flair for the dramatic is going to get the barrel of a shotgun shoved straight up my ass. He stops mid-rant, though, something contemplative layered over his anger. “Although I don’t think it was the agents who did it. That Ackerman guy’s apparently a distant cousin of Mikasa’s father. He and the other fella showed up last week and tried to shake both of us down for information. From the way they talked, it sounded like they didn’t _want_ the media gettin’ mixed up in all of this. Some lab tech probably saw the opportunity to make a buck when they developed those pictures and sold copies to the papers.”

“Doesn’t really matter how it happened,” I shrug. “We’re fucked either way. We don’t have anywhere to go for him to heal when he wakes up – _if_ he wakes up, oh God…”

“He’s gonna be fine, and so are you. There are places you can go.”

“Where? We can’t stay in hotels anymore, especially not for as long as we’d need to.”

“Have you seen the state of the economy? Whole damn country’s full of empty houses. If you pick the right ones and make sure to be careful, you can lay low as long as you need to.” Eren has a point. It’s not a plan, per se, but it’s a place to start, and that’s more than I had before. Miracle upon miracle, and he just keeps giving, bloodless-pale and bone-deep sad as he tries to get his smoke lit again. “I can give y’all a few days. You can hide out here until Marco’s well enough to travel, but that’s all I can do for you.”

I take the matchbook from him and strike it on the first try, giving him something that might pass for a smile when he breathes out on a long drag and starts rubbing at his arm again. “That’s more than I deserve. I don’t know why you’re helping us at all.”

“Yes you do,” he says. He acts like he doesn’t see me flinch. “I wish I could do more, but I’ve got my folks to think about. Your folks, too. No one knows when those agents are gonna come by again, and… well. You ain’t exactly in any kinda shape to hear it right now.”

“Tell me.”

He purses his lips around the cigarette. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“Eren.” It takes several seconds and all the willpower I have left to make him look at me. God, he looks just like Mom, aged years in a matter of months, a hostile weariness hanging beneath his eyes. My fault. “If there’s something else going on, I need to know.”

Eren’s quiet for a long time, letting the cigarette burn down where he rolls it between his fingers, brow furrowed into the frown he gets when he’s looking at a stack of overdue bills and deciding which ones to pay. He’s weighing his options, trying to figure out how much he can tell me without pushing me past a breaking point I’ve already left behind. Even now, he’s still trying to think of my best interests. I’m halfway to telling him that our safety is more important than my comfort when he sucks in a breath through his teeth and says, “I don’t think the FBI are the only ones after y’all. Smith and Ackerman were pretty straightforward with who they were and what they wanted. But I had a pretty shady character come into the garage today, some guy with self-inflicted engine trouble on his Model A who asked a bunch of weird questions and snooped around the shop while I was checkin’ the car. Disappeared awful fast once he figured out I was onto him. Never even got a name.”

The guilt’s already there, but now it’s keeping company with the icy blast of fear that shoots down my spine and straight into my gut. It was bad enough dealing with the law, but dealing with another force entirely opens up a whole new can of worms. It could be anyone. Family or friends of people we’ve hurt, someone whose territory we’ve unknowingly crossed into, maybe even Annie deciding that we’re loose ends that need to be tied off after all. Who it is doesn’t matter. The frightening thing is that whoever they are, they were able to trace us back to Dallas, back to the garage, back to _Eren,_ all with questionable intentions and without the help of anything legal _._

On top of everything else, I’ve painted a massive target on his back by association alone. How much more red has to go on my ledger before it’s soaked clear through?

I bury my face in my hands, trying not to start crying again. It’s not that I think he wouldn’t have any sympathy for me if I did – it’s that I’m afraid he’d try to comfort me and I’d be reminded once again of how in this world where moral absolutes are so confusing, he still manages to be too good for his own well-being. “I never meant for any of this to come down on you.”

He doesn’t look at me, fixated on the way the ashes crumble in a fine dust across the stained denim of his jeans. When he answers me, he doesn’t even sound like himself, too soft and measured to be anywhere close to the Eren I knew. “Reckon you just go so used to me cleaning up your messes that you didn’t think about it when you made one too big for me to handle.”

“I’m really sorry, Eren,” I whisper.

Just look at me. For God’s sake, give me that much more. Just look at me and let me say my mea culpa, not that it fucking matters, not that any of my regrets matter in the wake of all the destruction dancing off my fingertips like some sort of dizzying up-tempo rag, ringing off-key harmonies that sound like screams and broken glass and _SO DO I._ Just give me this one last chance to make amends.

I know better than to think I can fix anything. That’s always been Eren’s specialty. I just want him to _look at me._

He stares straight ahead, watches his cigarette burn out to nothing and asks, “For what?”

“Everything.” A cracked laugh, something on the verge of a meltdown, and it takes hearing something broken in me to trigger his reflex to mend, to finally make him look my way. “All of this shit. That night at my house. I… I should have said something. I just didn’t know what you wanted me to say.”

“You were never gonna say what I wanted you to say.” Eren’s voice wavers as much as mine, but something born of his own stubbornness or a mutual realization that this moment had to come keeps him here, keeps him looking at me even though his eyes go glassy and he has to swallow hard before he speaks again. “It wasn’t about that. It was about… closing the door. Letting it end. It’s hard, okay? It’s fuckin’ _hard_ , because I don’t know how to _not_ love you.”

The admission leaves him like a physical weight off his chest, comes out on the back of an almost-sob that he fights back with a ferocity I’ve never had in me. His hands fall open in his lap, and he stares down at his empty palms like he’s staring down the darkness at the end of the world, his spine bowing beneath the weight of it. “I’m gonna have to learn how to let you go.”

“Eren—“ I start, but he shakes his head, sharp and violent, like he’s trying to shake the sound of my voice saying his name out of his head.

“I’m not gonna sit here and pine after you. It ain’t fair to either of us. But walkin’ away is hard. All I wanted was a kick in the ass to get me out the door.”

Everything he’s given me, and all he wanted was for me to let him down. I’ll try. Even if it makes me feel sick and awful and like I’ll never find a moment where I don’t hate myself ever again, I’ll try. I owe him that and so much more, and if there’s one thing I won’t be – outlaw, fool, and miserable disaster are all titles I can’t take back – it’s a debtor.

“I love Marco.”

Eren lights another cigarette and grumbles, “Yeah, I know.”

“No, listen. I love Marco. I’m never _not_ gonna love Marco. And I… I can’t love you the way I love him.” The same awful thought strikes me that did in the dim shadows of my back yard that night, the thought that if things had been different, I could have. I could have loved him. He has loved me with the very blood in his veins. And I… well. In a world where I’d never gotten a taste of free air and learned what life was like outside Dallas’ dusty chokehold, we might have had something like happiness. But that world is a world without Marco, a world I can’t even bring myself to think of after everything I’ve done and still would do to keep him with me, and even if Eren doesn’t understand that, he still needs to hear it. “That’s not to say it never could’ve happened, but I’ve made my choice, and I chose him. There’s your kick in the ass.”

He closes his eyes and sucks in a breath, forcing himself to sit straighter. Building himself back up. “Thank you.”

“Is that what you wanted?” I ask, hoping I’ve done at least one thing right.

“No. But it’s what I needed.”

The door rattles open, and out shuffles Mikasa, something straight out of a penny dreadful with her bloodstained bathrobe and flyaway hair. She flops down on Eren’s other side and snatches the cigarette from between his lips, giving him a glare that could drop a bull elephant when he acts like he’s going to reprimand her before she takes a drag and turns over to me. “He’ll pull through. I’ve got him patched up and medicated for the pain, so he’ll be pretty disoriented when the chloroform wears off in a bit, but he’s going to live.”

_He’s going to live._

Relief slams into me so hard that for one blissful moment, it pushes everything else out in the way, a giddy, exhausted laugh bubbling up in my throat. I very nearly kiss her, but she looks like she’ll kill the first thing that comes within a two foot radius, so I settle for a shaky exhale and a “Thank you.”

“Just doing my job.”

Eren gets to his feet, stiff, and mumbles, “I’m gonna go see if they need help.”

Mikasa waits until the door shuts behind him before she asks me, “Did you two talk?”

“Yeah,” I nod, the old ache creeping back into my chest. “I owe you an apology, too.”

The list of people I’ve hurt is more of a novel, but Mikasa has her own chapter. She may not have loved me in the way I once thought she did, but she still had to deal with the fallout of me disappearing, still had to handle the shame and the whispers that came along with being the girl the criminal left behind. She still had to hold Eren together after I tore him to pieces. Maybe in the end, she’s the real miracle worker.

“Not really,” she shrugs, grinding the smoke out in the dirt beside her. “You did some bad things, but in the long run it’s not any worse than what we did by expecting you to go along with the plans we had.”

“There were plans?”

“There were hopes. Obviously, we thought that you and Eren would...” Trailing off, she pulls her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around her legs and watching the guttering flicker of Eren’s porch light in the dark. “And you and I would have been comfortable, y’know. We’d have gotten along fine.”

“You would’ve married me as a cover?” I frown. There’s charity, and then there’s throwing your whole life out the window. “To be _comfortable?_ ”

Mikasa just leans back against the wall, the corners of her lips quirking upwards, not so much sad as tired. “Comfortable is all I’ve ever wanted, Jean. The way I see it, things like what you and Marco have going, or anybody else… I don’t want it. I never have. But it’s a little hard for me to just _not_ get married. I’m twenty years old, and Carla was already giving me the ‘you don’t want to end up an old maid’ talk before you and I started going steady. I figured it would work. I mean, you’re one of my best friends, and if it would’ve helped you and Eren… well. We should have just told you instead of waiting for you to figure it out. No offense, but you’re not the quickest on the uptake.”

An entire life spent just assuming that we’d end up with white picket fences and comfortable normalcy one day, and I never thought to ask. I’m either an idiot or a self-absorbed bastard. Probably some mixture of the two. “Guess I’m not.”

“You shouldn’t apologize for loving him, though,” she says.

“I’ve put you two through hell,” I argue, still trying to figure out how to take the broken pieces of my life around my feet and cobble some of them back together.

“But do you regret loving him?”

There are a lot of things I regret, almost more than I can count, but loving Marco isn’t one of them. “No.”

Mikasa just raises an eyebrow at me, her point made. “Then don’t apologize for it.”

“Guess there’s no point in it, anyway,” I huff, tracing fractured patterns in the dust beneath my hands. “Eren’s never gonna forgive me.”

“I think he forgave you a while ago, honestly,” she hums, looking over at the door of the barn like she could see what’s going on behind it. “He told me once that he never wanted to make you feel something that wasn’t there. All he needed was closure.”

“And what about you?”

Mikasa smiles, honest-to-God _smiles,_ her hand soft and cool when she reaches over to rest it over mine. “I think I can handle Carla’s fussing and a bunch of old women’s gossip. Don’t worry about me. I’m tough.”

“Damn straight you are,” I laugh, holding out my arm. She leans against me with an exhausted, grateful sigh, asleep before I have time to ask if she’s tired.

And I sit like that for a while, Mikasa asleep on my shoulder while a few lonely crickets sing out in the dark, and I dare to let myself think that maybe everything hasn’t gone to hell just yet.

The door opens just a crack, Eren’s head poking out, features tight and unreadable. “He’s askin’ for you.”

Mikasa stirs with a sleepy hum, leaning back so I can move. “Go on. He needs you.”

That’s always been my top priority, my higher calling. Everything in the world I left behind fell to pieces because Marco needed me, but that doesn’t stop me from running to him now, leaving Eren with his sister and rushing into the barn. Marco’s injuries look a lot less scary covered under sterile white bandages, wound around half of his face and down his torso, and the situation seems far less grim with his eye open and focused on me, clouded with pain and drugs but still _alive_.

“Hey, darlin’,” he slurs, and nothing has ever sounded sweeter.

I nearly knock Connie over in my haste to get to him, falling to my knees beside him with a watery smile. “Hey. Hey, I love you.”

He blinks up at me and frowns, confused. “’S’everyone okay?”

“Yeah, baby, we’re all fine. We’re safe. You had me scared half to death for a bit, though. Eren and Mikasa saved your life.” Too disoriented to know he shouldn’t move, he tries to sit up and falls back with a low groan of pain through gritted teeth, and I’m reminded again of the hell I’ve wrought. The hand that squeezes mine back is clumsy and weak, but there’s a pulse humming in his wrist, and I’ll take it, I’ll take it and praise it for the miracle it is. “I’m so sorry, Marco. If I hadn’t gone back—“

“I love you.”

“This is my fault—“

“I love you.”

“I love you too, but—“

“I love you.”

He’s too out of it to know what I’m apologizing for. Or maybe he’s not, and this is all the absolution that his foggy mind is capable of giving, the constant promise that he loves me. Back in Louisiana, he promised me that was one thing that would never change. I find my anchor in a love I know I don’t deserve, let it steady me until I’m functional again, leaning down and pressing the gentlest kiss I can to the good side of his mouth. “We’re gonna be okay.”

“I know,” he says, his eyelid bruised and drooping heavy. “M’sleepy.”

“Go ahead and rest, sweetheart. I’m not goin’ anywhere.”

I’m not. This is where I belong, beside him, come hell or high water. It doesn’t take long for the drugs to pull Marco back under, but I stay there, his hand in mine, watching every rise and fall of his chest. Little miracles.

Mikasa comes back in to check on him before she sneaks back into the big house, and I ask her, “How many cuts did you stitch up?”

“Lord, I don’t know.” She shakes her head, checking Marco’s temperature and looking over at me. “Fifty? Sixty? Somewhere in that neighborhood. There were others that I didn’t have to stitch, though.”

She leaves with a quiet click of the door behind her, and I fall asleep counting to sixty over and over and over again.

* * *

The four days we spend hiding in the Jaeger’s barn are hot, messy, and painful. The supply of morphine that Mikasa manages to smuggle from the hospital is Spartan at best, and Marco’s only okay until it wears off. I’ve never seen anyone actually  _convulse_ with pain before until I’m holding him down for fear he pops his stitches, trying to talk him through the worst of it as he clenches his jaw so hard I can hear his teeth creaking. It’s a hot, messy, painful four days, but they pass. And despite all the odds, he gets stronger.

Mikasa’s main concern was waiting for Marco to replenish all the blood he lost, and now that he’s gone the better part of a week without hemorrhaging or succumbing to infection, the only thing left to do is wait for him to heal. We can’t do that here.

Instead, we get packing up the Dodge in the middle of the night, Mikasa giving Marco one last injection of pain meds and a tiny bottle for the road. We’ll have to ration them. Whiskey’s not exactly prescription, but it’s easier to get in a pinch than morphine.

“Where are y’all gonna go?” she asks, capping her syringe and shoving it back into the big leather bag that houses her stolen hospital. Jesus Christ, she’s braver than any of us.

“Probably for the best that we don’t tell you,” I tell her instead of confessing that I have no idea. “Just keep an eye on the papers; I’m sure we’ll pop up.”

“You always do, don’t you?” She shakes her head, darting forward and throwing her arms around my waist, hugging me so tight that my back cracks. “Be careful, you idiot.”

“Will do. You take care, too, Mikasa.”

But Mikasa’s moment of sentiment has passed, and she’s already busy turning around to lecture Marco, who’s lying on a bed of clean towels while Connie and Eren get the car loaded up. “Okay, now what’s your care routine?”

“Rest,” he recites in the singsong voice of a kid doing their multiplication tables. His mind’s still clear enough for him to be a little shit. The drugs won’t kick in for a while. “Change dressing at least once a day; soak the bandages in clean water before we take ‘em off, clean everything every time we change the dressing. Keep pressure on the eye whenever possible for a week.”

“And if anything starts bleeding?”

“Elevate, pressure, and douse the sucker in alcohol.”

Mikasa nods, slipping a little brown glass bottle out of the front of her uniform and pressing it into his palm. “I about had to turn backflips to get this out of the hospital. It’s a new drug called Prontosil, kills bacteria and stops infections. Treat these pills like they’re made of diamonds, you hear me? Only take them if you’re _positive_ that something’s gettin’ infected.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he says, polite as ever. “Thank you for everything.”

“Oh, and this, too. For when you’re healed.” Remembering at the last minute, Mikasa goes on a journey to the bottom of her bag, rooting around through bottles and bandages until she comes up with a patch of leather and a mess laces that she drops into his outstretched hand. An eye patch. “Take it easy, Marco.”

He tries to smile. He really tries. But the attempt flickers and dies on his lips when he looks down at the patch, replaced by something heavier.

I go to help Connie with the car before my self-loathing weighs me down too much to move.

It’s more rearranging than packing, moving things around so we can stretch Marco out across the back seat, shifting stacks of suitcases and moving the guns to the back end of the car. By the time I’ve got everything situated, Eren’s already trying to get Marco into the backseat, both of them bickering and oblivious to my presence.

“Hey, watch it!”

“Not my fault you’re a goddamn skyscraper! It’s your eye that’s busted, not your legs. Move on your own!”

“You’re an idiot, y’know,” Marco seethes, settling across the seat with a choked noise of pain.

“Thanks,” Eren snaps.

I can’t see them, but I fee the weight in Marco’s responding silence before he softly says, “You could’ve let me die, and then you would’ve had him.”

“No I wouldn’t have,” Eren snorts, slamming something around in the car before he continues, more pensive. “It’s always been you. It’s always gonna be you. I get that now. And I’m not gonna say you won, because Jean ain’t a trophy, but… he loves you. Not me. So yeah, I saved your ass. He loves you. You’re worth that much.”

“Well, either way, you still saved my life. I owe you a debt.”

“I’m not gonna land my ass in enough trouble for you to pay me back in this lifetime.”

“Guess I’ll catch you in the next, then.” If I didn’t know better, I’d say I could hear a smile in his voice. “You’re a bigger man than I gave you credit for, Eren.”

“Yeah, I s’pose you are too.” There’s no fondness from Eren, but there’s something that I’ve never heard from him in regards to Marco before – acceptance. Grudging respect. Of all the people in the world to end up playing at a terrifying adult game of blood brothers, the universe has an odd sense of humor to pick the two of them. “Listen, just… take care of him, okay?”

“I plan to.”

There’s a moment of quiet, followed by the soft thump of fabric hitting something solid and Marco sputtering. Eren snickers. “And don’t forget your stupid hat.”

I round the other side of the car, and Eren’s eyes go wide as dinner plates, so big that I can trace his thought process across them. I wave him off, leaning against the rear bumper with a weary sigh. “Everything’s packed up. Connie, you mind drivin’?”

“Long as I get the hell outta this barn, I don’t care who’s behind the wheel, man,” Connie grumbles, climbing into the driver’s seat.

I wait for Sasha to hop in beside him before I turn back to Eren, the hot knife of guilt twisting in my stomach again. One last miracle. Guess I won’t be coming back to him for any more. “Thank you again. For everything.”

He could tell me to fuck off. He could tell me that I’m the shittiest person alive, that I’m a crook for stealing his heart and a vagabond for mistreating it. He could haul off and sock me in the jaw. He could do any or all of the above, and he’d be in the right. Instead, he just pulls me into a brief, tight hug, breathing in when he holds me to him and breathing out when he lets me go. There’s a finality to it that’s more than just symbolic. “Just be careful out there, okay? They’ve got an eye on your folks, but if you need anything, call the garage during business hours. There’s no way to trace that.”

“Are you gonna be okay?” I ask. He’s still standing here, offering to work his magic. I wonder if Eren knows that nothing in life is supposed to come free.

He mulls it over for a second and nods, looking as surprised as I am. “Yeah. I am. Turns out a kick in the ass can do a lotta good. Drive fast, lay low, and…”

“Eren?”

“I was gonna say ‘look after each other,’ but I don’t think I gotta tell you to do that.”

“You be careful, too.” I’m too fresh off of almost losing someone I care about to just run off into the night without telling someone else I care about to watch their step, to be careful of the minefield they’re walking on because of me. “Any more weird visits to the garage, I’d call the feds.”

He just rolls his eyes and pops the hood of the car, giving the engine a quick once-over before slamming it shut again and banging on the metal twice, listening to the purr of Connie starting the engine with a tilted head and a curt nod of approval. “Don’t worry about me. Just get up the road while you’ve still got the dark.”

I watch his silhouette in the barn door until it’s long out of sight, turning around and letting the hum on the engine sink back into my bones. Connie’s driving North for now, no solid direction other than the hell out of Texas, and I’m inclined to let him roam wherever he wants, too tired of having everything resting on my shoulders to care.

“You all right?” Marco asks some time later, his head in my lap, the edges of his words soft with the pain medication.

“Yeah,” I lie, and I try to smile, but it falters when I look down and see all the bandages. Sixty scars to start with, and so many more to learn.

“It’s gonna take some gettin’ used to, ain’t it?” he grimaces, getting the wrong idea. “Me lookin’ like this.”

It would be a lie to say I don’t care about the scars. I care about them so much that they’re eating me alive from the inside out. But I don’t care about them in respect to how beautiful I’ve always found Marco, how beautiful I’m always going to find him. He had scars before. The only difference is that these new ones are mine, and I’m going to have to come to terms with owning them. Everyone trying to displace my blame is just as bad as everyone trying to tell me that I don’t know what I’m doing, and I won’t stand for either anymore.

Maybe Marco was wrong about life not being a storybook. Maybe heroes do exist.

And maybe I’m a villain.

If accepting that means staying with him, means having him love me, I’ll take my sins and own them for anyone who cares to ask.

I shake my head and lean down to rest my forehead against his. “I’m just glad you’re alive.”

“I am,” he muses. “That’s probably something they won’t expect.”

My foolishness and a broken window and the long arm of the law have all taken much from him, but they haven’t taken his drive. I can still see it in him, feel the rush of his satisfaction when I ask, “What do we do now?”

“Lay low for a little bit. Stay quiet.” Marco’s fighting the pull of the morphine tooth and nail, but right before he gives into it, I see something in his eye that edges upon frightening, a flash of something feral and vengeful that bleeds into the sleepy curl of his lips. “And then we get back to work.”


	23. Marco

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have a [tumblr.](http://southspinner.tumblr.com)
> 
> Warnings for graphic violence/ptsd/mental instability this chapter.
> 
> Enjoy the surprise ending. No, seriously. Enjoy it.

It's a long, hard five months.

We live – if you can call it that – in a constant state of waiting for everything to go to hell more than it already has, hiding in foreclosed houses for a week or so at a time before packing up and moving on again. It becomes a system, the same as it did before. Jean and Connie pull in cash by doing small jobs, gas stations and convenience stores. Sasha takes advantage of her anonymity to be the one who goes out and buys food and medical supplies. I lie in bed nursing a festering rage that goes deeper than any of the wounds I have and proves much harder to heal.

Burns fade. Scabs scar. But watching your life slip away is something that can’t get better. No one has to bother with telling me that I'm as good as useless now. I might not be the world’s smartest man, but I'm not too blind – or maybe I'm just blind enough – to see it for myself.

I spend my twenty-first birthday in a bed in Arkansas, riddled with an infection that takes me back to death’s door again. When the fever breaks two weeks later and I claw my way up out of the hideous canvas of my heat-warped dreams, Jean tells me that the pills Mikasa gave us before we left Dallas saved me. I try to remember the last time I saved myself. The effort exhausts me, and I fall back asleep and dream of hot knives and choking on blood.

No one ever really considers how important depth perception is until it's gone. I try to be patient, try to bite back hating how Jean acts like it’s a miracle when I manage to get on my feet at all, but it's hard to maintain any illusion of dignity when the world’s gone two-dimensional and I spend the first few days on my feet walking into something every few seconds. It gets better. I learn to compensate. But the memory of that helplessness sticks with me, grows in my gut like a suffocating cluster of weeds. There's no way to take that feeling and weaponize it, no way to twist it around and use it to make yourself feel powerful. There's only fighting it and praying that it doesn't choke the life out of you.

We spend the dog days of summer on an abandoned farm in Kansas, close enough to the border that Jean and Connie can run out of state for jobs and far enough from the nearest town that no one comes snooping around. Sasha goes two and three cities away for grocery shopping. Jean mentions that the hauls are good enough to get us through until Christmas if we’re careful.

A newspaper with our picture on it gets left out on the kitchen counter by accident one day. The article says I’m dead. I’m not inclined to disagree.

There’s not a better word for it, the numbness that settles in me when there’s not something darker there to take its place. I can walk, I can breathe, my heart still beats, and I know I should be thankful for that. But it’s hard when the supposed great second chance I’ve been given only amounts to me sitting around and waiting for our luck to run out. It’s hard to be thankful when the only things I have to occupy my mind are how Jean’s taken to shifting his focus to the left whenever he talks to me but still sleeps on the right side of the bed at night, whispering a faint tide of _twenty-six twenty-seven twenty-eight_ when he thinks I’m not awake to hear it. It’s hard to find gratitude in a whole barrel of much nastier things, almost impossible to track it down when Sasha drops a glass on the kitchen floor and it takes me an hour to convince my heart to keep a steady beat again.

I’m angry and bitter and hurt, and I suppose that’s what keeps me from being completely dead. I never thought I’d have to thank my demons for anything.

But is that existence really preferable? Is there any saving grace in having everyone around me look at me like I’m some sort of ticking time bomb? I start questioning myself the first time I see Jean’s smile falter after he thinks he’s out of my line of sight, and I never really stop after that. Introspection was always something I avoided in the past, scared of what I’d find if I delved too deep, but now I’ve got too much time on my hands to do anything else. So I sit there through the day and I lie there at night, and I take a shovel and break ground on the parts of myself that I’d once reasoned were better left buried.

I dig up some pretty awful, toxic shit, but that’s not a surprise by any stretch of the imagination. The worst part is finding the emptiness beneath it all, the place where the good used to be. I lose count of how many days I spend searching for the songbird that used to sing in me only to be met with silence. It’s flown south, leaving an empty cage haunted with too many shadows and not enough light to chase them away.

Jean’s love and Mikasa’s skill and Eren’s mercy might have given me back my life, but that wasn’t all I lost. The day in Dallas that took my eye and every possibility of Jean ever looking at me again without fighting back a flinch took something else, something I know I’ll never get back.

I just wish I could put a name on what it is.

My body heals. The rest of me doesn’t. Par for the course, really. The eyepatch is intrusive and uncomfortable, but I learn to live with it the same way I try to teach myself to cope with the rising blackness at the core of me, threatening to boil over in the declining heat as August fades. My head’s always been more accustomed to being a war zone than functioning under any self-imposed peace, and everything I fight back in my waking hours just crashes down that much harder at night. All the nightmares from before get pushed away in favor of a recurring one that always feels too real to be a dream. I relive everything a thousand times over, memorize the seconds before the world dissolved into blood and pain. The hindsight is worse than never knowing at all.

We stay in a foreclosed house in Louisiana that still has windchimes hanging on the front porch beside the bedroom window, quaint little handmade things strung together with twine and bottle-glass. A stiff breeze blows through one night, and I wake up screaming.

The nights get longer. The fight gets harder. Jean won’t come within a mile of touching me past fleeting kisses until summer’s on its deathbed, muttering fears of opening wounds that healed weeks before. When he finally does, he holds me like I’m so tragically fragile, like I’m something he could break, and I swear I hear something like _twenty-nine thirty thirty-one_ between the gasps of my name lost hot and humid in the crook of my neck. It’s not until after, when he’s tracing the pink-red reminders of shrapnel wounds scattered down my shoulder, that I realize what he’s been doing.

I’m not even _me_ to him. Not anymore. I’m just a taxonomy of scars.

Whatever I’ve lost, I resolve that night to find it again.

As awful as it’s been, sitting and stewing in my own darkness for months proves to be much easier than combating it head-on. The nightmares of watching endless loops of Levi Ackerman climbing out of a Ford V8 with a pistol in his hand and a nod of his head and the sun casting rainbows through the glass as it shattered inwards aren’t as hard to fight through as forcing myself to look in the mirror and acknowledge that the carnage they caused is very real. Hating the fact that my depth perception has gone completely to shit is easier than making myself get up and help Sasha out when I can and _practice_ until my movements don’t falter anymore.

And knowing that I’m useless versus _doing_ something about it… well. I guess playing impossible odds has always been my trademark.

It’s not a hard trail of logic to follow. I’m dead weight without a gun in my hand. I’m right-handed. When I shoot, I sight with my right eye. I don’t have a right eye anymore.

Jean looks at me like I’m insane when I start training myself to do everything left-handed – switching around how I hold my silverware, writing out long passages of memorized poetry onto torn paper bags in shaky penmanship – but he must think it’s better than me sitting around and drinking and sulking all day, because he never tries to stop me.

Ambidexterity doesn’t come easy, but with enough stubbornness and more broken pencils than I care to count, it comes. Summer ends, September arrives with hopeful gusts of cool air, and somewhere along the line we end up on a farm outside of Joplin, Missouri that the bank took back. The cycle starts again. Jean and Connie run over the state line for a job. Sasha tidies a house that isn’t hers.

I head out to the overgrown pasture with the Colt revolver that Jean used to bust me out of jail and decide that I’ve spent enough time letting my demons tell me how to live.

It takes a solid hour of shooting before I even manage to get one can off the fencepost, and even then, it’s probably just statistics saying that I had to hit _something_ sooner or later. Something weary in me says to go back inside. I tell it to shut the fuck up and empty another cylinder. And another. And another.

The barrage of gunfire abuses my ears until they’re sore and ringing, a sharp buzz that masks the sound of approaching car tires but doesn’t stop me from seeing Jean come jogging up from the driveway. Approaching from the left. How considerate of him.

I fire off another shot that goes wide. I can’t even tell how wide, because my concept of measurement is fucked for good.

And there’s that look again, that unnamed territory between guilt and pity that makes something clench in my stomach before he steps closer and says, “Marco?”

“I wouldn’t stand too close, darlin’, my aim ain’t the best right now,” I deadpan. He’s standing far enough to the side that there’s no danger in me taking another (unsuccessful) shot at my makeshift targets. Jean jumps anyway.

He waits until I’ve got the revolver opened to reload again before coming any closer, caution in every aspect of how he holds himself. God, he used to be anything but careful with me. “How long have you been out here?”

“Does it matter?”

“It matters if you look like you’re about to fall over, which you do.” I know better than anyone how little Jean’s been sleeping lately, but he shows it more than usual, heavy shadows beneath his eyes and a fatigue that drags down his movements as he winds an arm around my waist. “C’mon inside; Connie and I got a huge haul from this general store over the state line.”

It shouldn’t get to me. I shouldn’t _let_ it get to me, not when I know that he doesn’t mean anything by it and that he’s been fighting battles of his own that he won’t even share with me. Jean and I are all we’ve got, and both my head and my heart know that the best thing for me is to take that certainty and hold it close. But it’s _hard,_ just like everything else; it’s so damn _hard_ to love him the way he deserves when I can’t seem to remember where all of the softness in me has gone.

I should thank him for his concern and try to smile even though the scars will only make it crooked, but that’s _hard,_ so I take the easy route and jerk away from him and snap, “Stop treating me like a goddamn invalid, Jean.”

“I never said—“

“You didn’t have to.”

The hurt that settles on his face almost, _almost_ wakes something up in me, to the point that I reach out for him in an effort to take it back. But then he steps back, shaking his head, and it’s gone. “What’s gotten into you?”

“Besides five months of cabin fever, watchin’ you and Connie go out and do all the work while I sit here, and knowing that we’re all livin’ on borrowed time at this point?”

He stops short of whatever comfort he might have tried to offer me, because he knows I don’t want it. Meaningless platitudes about how everything is fine would only make the truth worse, and I’m grateful that Jean knows when to cut the bullshit. Keeping it up for Connie and Sasha’s sake is a different story, but with me, he just sighs, shutting his eyes against the glare of the setting sun. “We’ll think of something.”

“There’s no _something_ to think of. We can’t just hop from house to house and scrape a living off of gas stations and general stores forever, darlin’; the game don’t work that way. We need to get back to the plan.” This is it, that nameless anxiety that’s been coiled in the back of my head for months. Giving it a voice just makes it wind tighter, makes the clamor inside me rise to a roar of _we could if you were functional we could if you were worth something we could if you weren’t BROKEN—_ I grit my teeth around a growl of frustration that tugs so tight at my insides it causes a physical ache. “Which would be a lot easier if I could shoot a fuckin’ _gun!_ ”

The recoil buzzes up my arm, the familiar hum like an old friend to my bones, and once the reflexive panic at the sound of shattered glass and the gunsmoke both clear, there’s a little scrap of relief to be found in the wreckage of a bottle at the bottom of a fencepost.

“Seems like you’re getting better,” Jean offers.

Huffing out a breath that’s half a laugh, I flick the safety on and let the gun drop to my side. “Lucky shot. I’ve only hit one other so far.”

“So you keep practicing until you hit another one,” he says, lacing his fingers with mine over the grip of the Colt. “Rome wasn’t built in a day, sweetheart. You shouldn’t beat yourself up just because you’ve gotta start slow.”

“Five months is a little more than a slow start,” I grumble, but I don’t pull away. There’s a solidity in his touch that I need to keep me on my feet.

“We’re not in any hurry.” And maybe he’s not. Maybe that’s not just something said to keep me from losing what’s left of my mind.

Jean wants his freedom and his adventure, but there’s still that part of him that craves predictability, a whole life on scripts and schedules that can’t quite be erased. What feels like spinning our wheels and going in maddening circles to me probably feels like comfort to him. He knows me better than anyone, but there are still times when I feel like our differences are a distance that can’t quite be crossed. Me loving him might as well be the moon loving the sun. On certain days and certain times when everything’s just right, we can exist peacefully on the same plane for a little while, but the rest of the time it’s just a dizzying cycle, chasing each other across the sky and wondering when we’ll finally catch up. If I hadn’t already done it for those perfect few weeks in Louisiana, I’d wonder if it were even possible for me to love him in stillness.

That’s a silly thought to have, though. I figured out a long time ago that sometimes loving him is the _only_ thing I’m capable of doing. In stillness or on the run, with him every hour of the day or apart from him for five months behind bars, I love him.

There’s at least one thing I’m still good for.

“I’m in enough hurry for all of us,” I laugh, the sound of it hollow and dry. “I’d like to knock at least one setback off the fact that I’m ugly _and_ useless.”

“Hey.” Jean’s palms settle against the sides of my jaw, the right more gentle than the left even though the touch is still insistent enough to pull me down until my forehead’s resting against his. Up this close, it’s easier to see the way the stress has peeled literal weight off him even as it stacks the figurative kind on his shoulders, cheekbones cast in sharper relief and the sunset lighting his eyes up to a dulled amber. God, he looks tired. “Marco. Look at me. You’re beautiful, and you’re _not_ useless.”

He’s looking at me, but his focus is pulled to the left. The side that still looks like who I used to be. He’s got this thing with denial, that beautiful boy of mine, a way of sticking his head in the sand and thinking that his stubbornness can make something true. I try to smile, but it comes out wrong, so instead I turn my head and press a kiss to the heel of his hand. “How many times do I gotta tell you that you’re a shit liar?”

Jean steps back, looking like I’ve just punched him in the stomach instead of reminding him that reality exists. I guess we both know by now that the two feelings can be similar. I want to go back to the way things were before, to the times when I could smile against his mouth and promise him everything and _mean it_. The way our world turns now is off-center and feels so wrong. I was never supposed to be the one bringing him down. I never wanted to be the reason behind the hurt he bites back, never wanted to be why he stands there looking lost.

He’s got every reason to walk away, but instead he stays and asks, “If I tell you how to fix your aim, are you gonna write me off?”

“I’ve been out here for ages and—“

“And you’re still standing like you’re shooting right-handed. You need to switch how you’re holding yourself.”

He draws up behind me, hands skating across my tense shoulders and tilting my stance to the side. Now’s not the time to be thinking of it, but I remember that day on the way to Houston, the one when I’d pulled up to an empty barn and taught him how to shoot just like this, standing behind him while he’d struggled and looked so lost. I can’t tell if this is full circle or just some bizarre mirror image, and there’s no point in dwelling on it. What’s worth noting is that with the slight tilt of my body, the angle of my sight straightens out, and it’s almost _easy_ to compensate for the lack of depth perception, almost the old reflex when I hold my arm steady and squeeze the trigger.

It’s every bit of the old satisfaction when the can flies off the fencepost with a metallic ring.

I go down the line and shoot again and again until the Colt’s cylinder is empty, each round hitting its target. I’m not ready to try any trick shooting yet, but it’s solid. I’d trust myself in a crisis – or rather, I’d trust my marksmanship – and that’s more certainty than I’ve had in five long months.

Something in me relaxes. I turn around to look at Jean, and he’s smiling, the curve and warmth of it genuine even through his heavy-hearted gaze. “How’d you know that?”

“I had a good teacher,” he says, tilting his head back to brush a kiss across my cheek. The right one. His lips ghost over a scar, and he doesn’t flinch, just buckles a little under a moment of sadness that’s gone as soon as I see it. “Don’t stay out too long.”

Jean goes back inside, and I stay out until the sun sinks too low for me to see my targets, letting the steadiness come back to me with every shot until I feel something like myself again. By the time I go back inside, the house is dark and quiet save for the soft creak of floorboards back in the bedroom that Jean and I share, tracing his footsteps as he walks around. He smiles at me when I walk in, and it’s almost the one I fell in love with.

When I lean in and kiss him, he kisses me back just as hard, and that’s such a marked improvement that I decide to stop comparing things so much for a little while and just _live_ , searching for that nameless something I’ve lost in the hopes that maybe I can find it somewhere in him.

After, in the humid stillness of the room with rumpled sheets tangled around our legs, I’m almost tired enough to consider going to sleep, running headlong into the nightmares and feeling a little braver for it after today’s progress. Jean’s quiet, his breaths slow and even, but I can still feel how his lips write a silent _six seven eight_ against my shoulder as his fingertips skate up over the ridges and valleys of my damaged skin.

“You’re counting them again,” I mutter.

He freezes, and when I roll over, there’s so much guilt etched into every inch of him that I wonder how his body hasn’t broken. The hand that wasn’t taking inventory of my scars is tangled up in the necklace that carries his ring in its constant place over his heart. Jean never bothered with getting a new chain after the old one snapped, just used a length of twine that’s too rough for that purpose, chafing his pale skin raw and pink with how much he tugs at it. It’s like he _wants_ it to hurt, a punishment, a penance instead of a reminder that I love him. A ball and chain that used to be a badge of honor.

“Sorry,” he says. That’s more than I’ve ever been able to do.

“It wasn’t your fault.” Jean gives me the _don’t fuckin’ patronize me_ look, and I sigh, reaching up to pry his fingers away from the twine he’s got knotted up around his neck like a noose. “You didn’t shoot out the widow. You didn’t push me in front of it.”

“But if I hadn’t gone back—“

“And if both of us had done a lotta things differently, God knows where we’d be right now.” If I’d gone with my instincts and driven out of Dallas without stopping for the job, if I hadn’t been selfish in staying in Louisiana because I wanted to hold onto that peace, if Connie hadn’t struck the deal with Annie that got the feds on our ass in the first place… There are too many could-have-should-have-would-have’s down that line of thought. Jean’s made bad decisions, sure, but so have I, and probably in greater volumes than he has. I just wish that he could see the pointlessness in all that hatefully perfect hindsight long enough to stop torturing himself. “That kinda logic don’t put the guilt on you. I don’t blame you, for whatever that’s worth. I should’ve told you that a long time ago.”

“Who else is there to blame?” he laughs, soft, bitter. I know how hard it is to pull yourself out of the nosedive that comes with heaping all the responsibility for life’s downfalls on your shoulders, but Jean’s not even fucking _trying,_ eyes fixed dead ahead and blinders on, determined to throw himself against a brick wall until he can’t anymore.

I swallow a noise of frustration and remind myself that these things take patience. “A list, but it’s pretty safe to say that Levi fuckin’ Ackerman’s somewhere near the top.”

Jean frowns. “Not Smith?”

“He’s on there, but he ain’t the one that gave a bunch of cops the order to fire at us before ever givin’ us a chance to give up peacefully.”

I’ve seen it on repeat enough to remember every detail of how it happened, and I know enough of the law to know how it _should_ have happened. It’s not that I’m bitter over what happened to me (I am. I’m _so far_ beyond bitter that I’m not even sure what I am anymore), but something more closely aligned to the fever dreams I had when I was laid up with my infection, the ones where it had been Jean in front of the window instead of me. The difference between me living with my scars and him possibly dying with them was only a few feet, and it never should have happened. Maybe looking back on our bad decisions won’t get us anywhere, but it’s a little more gratifying to look back and have someone to blame as a point to focus all that unshed wrath.

“We wouldn’t have given up peacefully,” Jean points out after a while.

The darkness at the core of me, the anger, none of it disappears. But when I look at him, it fades enough for me to grin and shake my head. “Nah. Not our style.”

“I love you,” he says, a sigh of relief.

“Love you too, darlin’.” For a moment, something beneath my skin that’s been wound tight for five months loosens.

But then there’s a crunch of gravel outside the window, and that moment is over.

“What in the high holy hell?” I whisper, going to roll out of bed, but Jean’s already beaten me to it, tugging his pants back on and looking out through a crack in the curtains.

“Oh shit.”

“Jean?”

“Oh _shit._ ”

A stab of unease twists in my gut, and I trip over my own feet, cursing as I feel around for my clothes in the dark. “What happened?”

“Either Connie and I weren’t careful enough shaking the laws tailing us after that job, or someone heard those gunshots when you were practicing earlier,” says Jean still watching out the window with a sort of frozen horror as I’m fumbling with my shirt. He’s silent for another few seconds, and then he turns back to look at me with this manic, hysterical little laugh. “They have an armored car.”

Oh shit, indeed.

After so much time off, my brain doesn’t remember how to function in a crisis. For a while, it’s nothing but blind panic, a long, extended stretch of radio static in my head that sinks down into my bones and sets me buzzing, paralyzed and useless. I have to stomp it down, have to marshal my wits where they used to be second nature, but clarity comes, and that’s the important thing. Now is not the time for weakness.

“Get the guns and get downstairs,” I tell him, grabbing my hat and my gun off the nightstand and heading for the hallway. “No lights, and _stay away from the windows,_ for fuck’s sake.”

“But—“

“Leave everything else! Just hurry, Jean.”

He looks like he’s going to argue for a second, but then his fingers brush across his ring before he tucks the necklace under his shirt and whispers, “Okay.”

I’m not the fastest person in the world on my best day, and when I am fast, I’m _loud._ It’s a whole new brand of challenge, trying to be stealthy while sprinting up a hallway in shadowed darkness with one eye.  I decide to count the fact that I don’t smack headlong into a wall as skill instead of my miracle allowance for the day. We’ll need a couple more if we have any hope of making it out of here.

Connie and Sasha are sound asleep when I throw their door open (thank _God_ that Connie Springer is a kind man with no vengeance in his heart and no desire to make me pay for all the times he walked in on me and Jean in the middle of any number of illicit activities), curled up together under their threadbare quilt and both jumping when I yank it off. “Wake up. Get dressed. We gotta go.”

Connie just lies there and blinks at me. I remind myself that screaming in frustration would be counterproductive. “Wha’ time’s it?”

“Time to _get the fuck outta bed,_ Connie; we’ve got a whole mess of trouble outside.”

That wakes him up. Connie sits up in bed, his head moving in a nervous twitch towards the window. “Laws?”

“And an armored car,” I nod. “I think our federal agent friends came to pay us a visit.”

Sasha hisses something under her breath and rolls over to grab a flashlight off the nightstand. “Oh for the love of—“

“No lights!” The looks she gives me when I yank the flashlight out of her hand says that she’d probably like to pop me right in the jaw if given half the chance, but I don’t give it to her, backing up into the doorway and nodding down the hall. “They think we’re still asleep. That’s the only advantage we’ve got right now. Get downstairs, and stay quiet about it.”

My head’s still spinning too fast to make any real progress with a solid plan. I’m running on instinct. The deepest parts of me have a simple rule that I can fall back on when nothing else makes sense. For my survival, I only need two things – a gun in my hand, and Jean.

One of those things is curled tight in my fist, and the other is waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs with big, scared eyes.

“I took a look around,” he whispers.

“Thought I told you to stay away from the windows!”

“I took a look around and _they’ve got us surrounded,_ Marco. There’s no way out.”

I groan and sink down into one of the kitchen chairs, dropping my revolver on the table with a clatter and pressing my hands to the sides of my head. Think. _Think,_ dammit, it’s all you’re good for.  Somewhere between Connie and Sasha showing up in the kitchen and another ominous crunch on the gravel outside, something clicks. I look up at Jean, already knowing how this is going to go. “There is. You just won’t like it.”

“When do I ever?” He sighs, halfway through loading his handgun. “Talk to me.”

“Car’s in the garage, right?” He already looks skeptical. Too late to turn back now. “They think we’re still asleep. If we move fast – and I mean _fast_ – we can throw up the garage door and blast out through the lines.”

Jean’s shaking his head long before I’m even done talking. “We’d be full of lead before we ever got to the end of the driveway.”

“Maybe not.” Most likely, but maybe not. I decide to leave the actual odds out of the argument since they won’t work in my favor. “It’s a fast-moving target and they ain’t expecting it. It’s a chance.”

“A chance you’d bet your life on?”

“It’s either maybe die out there or definitely die in here, Jean! Can you come up with anything better in the next ten seconds?!” I even give him a slow count of ten, just because I sort of _want_ to be talked out of this. Jean doesn’t say anything. “Didn’t think so. Garage. Go.”

And he does. Shoulders stiff and jaw clenched, he goes, so fast that I have to scramble to catch up with him. The garage is an old carriage house that got attached to the house in a later renovation project, musty and stifling in the inky darkness that covers it. My vision doesn’t adjust to the dark as quickly as it used to, and I’ve already run into the car and a workbench by the time I manage to make it over to Jean, who’s standing by the driver’s side with the car keys in his hand.

“What are you doing?” I ask, already knowing the answer but hoping that the confrontation will make him reconsider.

“Going through with your damn fool plan,” Jean snaps. “Now get in the car.”

So much for dealing with it gently. I make a grab for the keys, and Jean jerks them back. My last-ditch effort is sliding between him and the car door, and it works well enough to make him pause. “You’re not driving.”

“Funny,” he says, a look on his face that says he knows damn well it’s not funny at all, “I’m the one with the keys.”

Patience is a virtue. A virtue I’ve never been too good at in practice, but I elect to ignore that part, sucking in a deep breath through my nose and wishing away the roaring headache that’s coming home to roost in the space behind the wreckage of my right eye. “Jean, listen to me. Everyone else will at least be able to duck down and give themselves a little bit of cover. If you’re driving, you’re a wide open target.”

“And you _can’t_ drive. With your eyesight the way it is, you’d crash us into something and it’d all be over.”

“I…”

There it is again. Just when I think I’ve made some progress, that feeling of uselessness comes back again, sets up camp in the tight spot in my chest and digs its heels in when I realize that I can’t even come back with anything in the face of Jean’s logic, because he’s right. Being able to shoot a few cans off a fence doesn’t make me my old self again. Maybe I’ve been trying for something that’s been an impossibility all along. Maybe the best of me flew off on songbird wings, somewhere I can’t reach.

Maybe it’s never coming back.

“We don’t have time to argue about this,” says Jean, a softness to him that wasn’t there before. There’s no comfort in it. He’s only backing off because he’s watching the spiderweb cracks spread out under my skin, doesn’t want to be the one responsible for breaking me at the worst possible moment. His hand comes up and presses into the curve of my neck, tracing patterns that should be soothing against my skin.

I never could stand being coddled.

Turning away from him, I round the front of the car – an older V8 model that we switched out a couple of weeks ago after we got done in Kansas – and yank one of the BARs out from under the passenger seat. “Connie and I can give you some cover fire. If we can keep ‘em confused long enough to get a head start, we might make it.”

In the back seat, Sasha’s already started in on her own coping mechanism. _“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures_ – Connie Springer, if we survive this, I’m gonna _kill you_ for dragging me into this mess.”

“Yeah, love you too, baby,” Connie deadpans, poking at the latch on the garage door and looking back and forth between it and the car. Timing how fast he can run and dive into the back seat.

God, I’ve lead us all to our deaths.

I swallow hard around the thought, trying to remember that fear only serves to cloud things up and checking the safety on my weapon. “Once we’re out of the garage, everyone get down. Connie, you and I’ll just shoot blind out the windows, try to fan it out and lay down a cover. And Sasha?”

“Yeah?”

“You’re probably the only one in this car who God’ll listen to anymore. I’d start prayin’ for all of us if I were you.”

In the tense silence that follows, Jean’s low murmur sounds almost explosive. “I love you.”

“You sure you want those to potentially be your last words?” I laugh, half-deranged, the apprehension pressing like a ten-ton weight on my ribs.

He starts the car and looks over at me, so goddamned _determined_ that for a few moments, it chases my doubts away. “I love you.”

“I love you too.” That much is something I haven’t lost. That much is enough to ground me. I remember what I’m fighting for, and I lean out the window and tell Connie, “Okay, pull it.”

Connie yanks the garage door up, and the world slows to a crawl. There’s a strange sort of hypersensitivity that comes with driving headlong into the gaping maw of death, something that makes me feel every little thing, the hum of the engine beneath my feet, the rough scrape of Connie’s panicked _get down get down get down_ against my eardrums, the way Jean’s bones creak with how hard he grips my hand before he slams on the gas pedal. For a moment, everything is silent.

And then, everything _explodes._

The whole plan hinged on us being the ones to fire first, and I’m at least good for that much, shooting blind (Ha. Haha.) out the window over my head, sweeping the automatic rifle back and forth and hoping that it’s enough to lay down a cover. Jean and Connie are cursing and Sasha’s screaming, but I take the noise and treasure it. If they’re screaming, it means they’re alive.

And so am I. For the first time in five months, I’m _alive,_ heart hammering in painful throbs against my ribcage and veins singing electric with the rush of it all. Sometimes it takes brushing a little too close to your grave to make you remember what living really feels like.

My ammunition runs out with a dull click that’s too-loud in my ears, and I choke out something that might not even be English, scrambling for a clip and chancing one peek up over the window to get a read on the situation.

Disaster. It’s complete chaos. Three bodies on the ground who didn’t take cover in time and cars _everywhere,_ more of them than I thought, all overshadowed by the hulking specter of the armored truck several yards away. There’s so many. Even if we make it out, they’ll follow us, and then what, then what, what have I done, then what—

There isn’t another clip for the BAR. Our extra ammunition is rattling around somewhere in the back of the car, useless to me, and every second that passes without cover fire is a second that the men huddled for cover behind their cars grow braver, ready to take another shot.

No ammo. They’ll follow us. Connie’s out, too. That many cops, one of them’s bound to catch up. They’ll follow us, and it’ll be over—

Unless they don’t.

Jean cuts the wheel hard, trying to skirt the blockade at the end of the driveway. The armored truck is sitting like a sentinel across the road, but what draws my attention more than the vehicle itself are the two silhouettes standing beside it. There’s a moment that stretches out into what feels like an eternity, an infinite second where I look at Levi Ackerman and he looks at me, and then my head dissolves into all the ugly darkness I’ve been holding back.

_(Do it do it do it DO IT he’s right there you’ll never get this close again—)_

I could. I’d want to. Every part of me is screaming for it. The revolver’s out of my waistband and clutched in white-knuckled fingers before I even register reaching for it.

_(Take the shot goddammit he’s RIGHT THERE take the shot and maybe that will make it stop maybe that will make it better—)_

Close enough that I could do it half-blind. Close enough that it could be over in a flash, squeeze the trigger, bang. Retribution, payment in blood for all those things I’m not anymore, all the parts of me I’ve lost, vengeance for the wreckage of who I used to be. Maybe I’m nothing but a shadow, but it doesn’t take much to be able to aim a gun, and the flash of recognition and fear in his eyes makes me feel a little stronger.

_(You’re lost and you’re broken and the man responsible for it is right there and what are you if you don’t make him pay for that you’re weak you’re weak you’re so fucking weak—)_

Through the violence and the clamor in my mind, I hear Jean yelling something about a fence and the road and _Marco what the fuck are you doing get down_ , and somewhere in the gunshots I swear there’s a trace of birdsong.

_(What are you waiting for take the shot—_

_They’ll only follow you if you don’t do something, now isn’t the time—_

_TAKE THE FUCKING SHOT—)_

“Marco, for the love of God, _duck!_ ”

_(Would you put revenge over him?)_

My vengeance will never be worth Jean’s life, so I shift my aim up a few feet and fire again and again, emptying the cylinder and hoping for the best.

The siren splits the air like a banshee’s wail, loud and persistent, assaulting my ears to the point that my teeth ache. Most armored cars have one, an emergency signal that can be controlled from the driver’s seat – or by sinking a bullet or five into the wiring. I slump back in my seat, gun and reserve of willpower both empty, and watch in the rearview mirror as the handful of cars on our tail pull back.

“Are they… are they retreating?” Jean asks, grip tight on the wheel.

Connie scrabbles back up into his seat, not even bothering to look out the window. “Who cares, _drive!_ ”

The V8 goes roaring up the dirt road, a trail of dust in its wake rather than a host of police cars. A silence falls, interrupted only by the sound of ragged breaths. I stomp down the angry cacophony of _you had him you HAD HIM HE WAS RIGHT THERE_ that’s bouncing like an echo off the inside of my skull, fighting around the tightness in my throat to ask, “Is everyone okay? Anyone shot?”

Everyone mumbles out some reassurance or another, and I feel at least one source of tension in me relax as I reach over and squeeze Jean’s knee. “Well, if that stunt we just pulled don’t make the history books, I don’t know what will.”

In the back seat, Sasha bursts into tears.

Jean burns rubber straight down the road, too panicked and single-minded to think about taking detours, and I’m too rattled myself to recommend it to him. Usually such a careful driver, the fact that he’s whipping around turns with skidding tires and swerving all over the place is a testament to how shaken up he is, how desperate we all are to put as much distance as possible between ourselves and the utter shitshow back at the farmhouse.

We’ve been driving for about twenty minutes when Jean very calmly says, “Marco?”

“What?”

“We’ve got no brakes.”

“We _what?!”_ Sasha screeches, making up for Jean’s composure with her own lack of it.

“No brakes. Nothin’. I’m standing on the pedal.”

“Oh, fuck me _sideways_ …” I hiss, looking down past the gearshift to see that Jean’s not exaggerating, ramming his foot into the brake pedal over and over. “Can you just let it coast?”

“Do you honestly expect me to make it into Oklahoma with no goddamn brakes?!” he gulps, taking his eyes off the road long enough to give me the trademark Jean Kirschtein _are you shittin’ me_ look.

“Don’t matter if we get to Oklahoma or not.” I get a skeptical stare, but it’s enough to make him take his feet off the pedals and let the car coast, slowing down on the next open stretch of road. “Smith and Ackerman were there, and they’ve got jurisdiction anywhere. We don’t need to get to Oklahoma. We just need to get the hell outta here as fast as possible.”

Jean mulls it over for a second, pursing his lips and nodding. “There was a turnoff for a train station about a mile back.”

“Yes, Jean, because we can just waltz in and buy train tickets!” Sasha laughs, a high-pitched cackle that sets my nerves on edge.

“Actually, Sasha, he might be onto something.” Rolling my shoulders back to shake off some of the weight on them, I grab the rest of the guns from under my seat, looking behind me at Connie and Sasha. “Everyone out.”

“The car is still moving,” says Sasha, the words coming out tear-cracked and thick. I have to remind myself that she’s just been through significant trauma to keep from saying anything too mean.

“The car is moving at a leisurely pace and will continue to do so without brakes, princess. You can hop out without dying.” Not exactly what passes for kindness, but given how frazzled we all are, definitely not the worst thing I could have told her.

We grab the guns and ammunition and bail out, the car trundling up the road without us for about fifty more yards before it stops on its own. Jean takes off jogging after it, crawling under the chassis – his inner mechanic is still there underneath the gunpowder and blood, and it won’t rest until he figures out what went wrong. The rest of us collapse on the side of the road, grateful for solid ground beneath our feet and trying to will our heartbeats back into submission. Connie reaches over and pulls Sasha into his arms, stroking her hair, and she’s too busy crying against his chest to make good on her earlier threat of killing him. He just looks straight ahead, still shell shocked, making eye contact with me over the top of Sasha’s head after a long moment and giving me this weary little smile that says, _By the skin of our teeth, huh, brother?_

I start reloading my pistol and answer with a soundless huff laugh that says, _Yeah, what else is new?_

Jean comes trotting back over after a few minutes, hands and shirt stained with motor oil. The sight of him like that makes me ache for back when everything was simpler and it was just the two of us, stealing Eren’s beer and sitting on the workbench in the garage with the radio crackling in the background. “Yup, looks like a bullet fucked up the mechanism. There’s no fixing that without parts.”

“We’re ditching the car anyway, darlin’,” I tell him, getting back to my feet. I heard something once about how there’s no rest for the wicked, but I never quite understood it until now. “Get a move on.”

We salvage what we can from the car – a few bags to hide the guns in and the meager supplies that we had stored in the back of the V8 – but every tiny thing we save only serves to remind us that almost everything we had, including all our money, is still sitting back in Joplin. We’re staring down the road ahead with next to nothing, and the thought that I haven’t been this unprepared to face the great wide world since I was sixteen and bleeding doesn’t do any wonders for my mental state.

So I don’t dwell on it. I _can’t_ dwell on it. I shove all of my baggage away so I have room on my shoulders the more literal sort, and I grab a valise full of bullets and set off down the road.

“So we’re going to the train station?” Jean asks some time later, still turning around every ten seconds to check the empty road for signs of pursuit. The quiet should calm me, but all it does is put me more on edge.

What the hell are they playing at? Staging a sting that big took time and money, two of mankind’s most precious commodities, and too much of them to throw it all out the window just because we got a head start. I caused enough confusion for us to get up the road by shooting off that siren – which, now that I think back to it, was probably a retreat signal – but it’s long past the time that the diversion should have been sorted out. It’s too quiet, and while part of me wants to kick myself for actually _wanting_ to hear the hounds nipping at my heels, the majority of me is still too rabbit-hearted and skittish to try that hard to figure out why we’re not in custody right now. I’m more focused on preventing it from happening.

Jean nudges my shoulder, frowning up at me. “Marco?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah,” I nod, preoccupied. The train station is up ahead, a rundown, desolate place with one guttering light outside. “Right over there.”

“And where are we going?”

“Wherever the train we get on is headed.”

“And we’re getting on this train how?”

“Same way lots of people do it,” I shrug, forgetting that Jean comes from finer stock than me and has probably never had to think about hopping a train in his life. We might be on equal ground now in terms of hardship, but we weren’t always. I dropped out of school to help out on the ranch after I finished the sixth grade, but the lessons I learned between then and now might just save our hides. “Same way I got to Houston when I was sixteen. A little bit of subtlety, and a little bit of gymnastics.”

Jean looks horrified. Maybe it’s the exhaustion, or maybe I’m just grasping at straws trying to find something good left to hold on to, but I choke back laughter all the way to the train station.

We’ve been luckier tonight than most people are in their whole lives, and that luck seems to follow us to the station. The place is a fucking dump, empty except for a lone guard patrolling the space next to where a train is parked on the tracks, one of the cargo cars open while another unloads armfuls of packages, carrying them back into the dilapidated office.

“We can’t get on with them standin’ there,” Jean whispers, huddled down beside me in the shadows beyond the station.

“That’s their job,” I tell him, squinting down towards the back end of the train. “So many folks are outta work and riding the rails to get around that they’ve started posting guards at train stations to scare ‘em off. They’ll go off somewhere else once it gets moving.”

“And once it gets moving, we’ll still be here.”

Biting back a smile, I turn in his direction and raise an eyebrow. “That’s where the gymnastics comes in.”

“Five easy months, and now this,” Jean groans. “When it rains it fuckin’ pours.”

“Don’t look so grim. It ain’t that hard. Hey, Connie, you ever done this before?”

Connie nods, scratching at the back of his neck. “Hitched one to Austin back before I met Sasha.”

“We’re both rusty, then. This’ll be fun.” It’s only half sarcasm. The me of five months ago would have gone in full blast, spouting off about train robberies and Jesse James. Whatever I am now is more careful and far more fragile, but smart enough to know that I need to at least do a good job of acting like my old self, at least until we’re out of harm’s way. We need something to hold us together, and I can’t put that burden on Jean, not when he looks a breath away from tearing apart at the seams. I can play a part for a few more hours, telling myself lies about how I’m something worth trusting as the guards disappear back into the office. “And there they go.”

Jean looks down at the far end of the train as the whistle blows, chewing on his lower lip. “Should we—“

“Not yet.” I can trace his train of thought, that it would just be easier to head down the train and hop on a different car in the shadows. But there’s no telling what’s in the other cars, and the worst possible ending to all of this would be hopping into the middle of a sleeper car full of armed guards. Jean gives me a funny look, but it’s too late for him to argue, the train lurching forward on creaky wheels that squeal against the rusty track. “Okay, now. Brisk jog, everyone. Wouldn’t want to miss our train.”

We have to duck behind the station to stay out of the light, and by the time we make it back to the tracks, the train’s picking up speed, turning our brisk jog into an all-out run. It’s hard progress with the weight of the guns on my back and the fact that I’ve been sitting on my ass for five months factored in with the unfortunate reality that I was never really made to be a sprinter. Connie’s a full five yards ahead of me in fifteen seconds, agility incarnate with how easily he hops up onto the outside of the car and flicks the latch.

“’It ain’t that hard,’ he said!” Jean gasps, shooting me a glare over his shoulder.

I roll my eye and plant a hand between his shoulderblades, shoving him forward. “Go.”

“Sasha!” Connie calls form the train, hooking one arm inside the car and reaching down with the other to give his wife a lift up. For all the complaints I can make about Sasha, she’s surprisingly athletic, vaulting up into the train with a dancer’s grace and smoothing out her skirt after she lands. Connie looks back to check on her before leaning out again, reaching a hand down to the closest person. “Okay, Jean, now you!”

Jean is a little less graceful in his ascent, diving into the car with a loud _oof_ followed by a colorful wave of cursing, but he makes it. The same might not be able to be said for me, though, because the train’s only getting faster, and I’m kicking myself with every ragged breath for not keeping in better shape during my sabbatical. Connie reaches out as far as he can without falling off the train, and it’s close enough, I’m close enough…

Or at least, I think I am. I grab for his hand and grab thin air instead. Fucking depth perception.

“Oh, _son of a—_ “

I’m halfway to resigning myself to being left behind when someone’s hand closes around the strap of my bag and _pulls,_ hauling me up into the car so fast that I slam forward and hit the floor on top of something that groans in pain and wriggles around.

“Gotcha,” Jean wheezes, patting my cheek and looking up at me through a breathless smile.

“You’ve gotten stronger.” Strong enough to haul a body that’s got a few inches and at least thirty pounds on him off the ground like a sack of potatoes. What have I been missing these past few months?

“Complaints?”

“Hell no,” I grin, darting down to kiss the tip of his nose before getting back on my feet again, the dark countryside outside the train car blurring as we gain speed.

“You,” Sasha seethes, stalking over and honest-to-God _punching_ me in the arm, “are _insane,_ you know that?! You’d think that after everything you’ve been through, you wouldn’t have a death wish, but _no,_ let’s jump on the moving train, everyone! What could possibly go wrong?”

“We’re alive, ain’t we?” I huff, retying my eyepatch and leaning back against the wall of the car. Sasha gives me a mutinous glare, but doesn’t say anything. “Exactly. Now mind your blood pressure and have a seat. We’re gonna be here for a while.”

The hours pass in relative silence, lulled by the slow rocking of the train car as it rattles down its path. The night’s too cloudy for me to find the North Star, so I have to wait until the gray light of almost-morning starts spreading down one end of the horizon to figure out that we’re headed West. Connie and Sasha withdraw to their own little section of the car, whispering to each other and looking my way every so often, but I can’t be bothered to give a shit about whatever it is they’re discussing.

Jean sleeps. It’s always baffled me, how sometimes he can be plagued with the same insomnia that keeps me up, but other times he can fall asleep anywhere – the front seat of a car, a sunken couch in one of Annie’s back rooms, a train car headed who-knows-where. I don’t know how he sleeps, but he does, curls up beside me against the wall and slumps into my arms, his breathing slow and even. He sleeps right through a few stops along the route, other rundown rural stations, and I sit there and hold him, knowing that the last thing I want to do right now is fall asleep and open up a door for whatever the _fuck_ was in my mind back in Joplin to rear its ugly head again.

Me and my demons, we can usually come to an understanding, but whatever I left back in Missouri was dangerous, even in comparison to most of the shit hiding in the darker parts of me. I came a breath away from putting my own revenge agenda over Jean and Connie and Sasha, my own ends over the lives of three people I care about. The worst part is, there’s still part of me now that whispers about how that wouldn’t have been so bad, only growing stronger as the miles roll on.

That nameless something that’s plagued me for weeks on end creeps back to where it was before, twisting in my gut with something caught between rage and hopelessness. I’ve lost so much. I was so much _more_ before all that shit in Dallas, and here I am now, can’t even hop a train without Jean saving my ass. And I can’t. I can’t do that. I can’t just _accept_ that this is the way things are now and lean on Jean, because Jean’s got enough to carry on his own, and he was never meant to haul the leaden weight of me around with it.

I’ve lost so much, and if any of the laws of the universe are constant, there’s got to be some big cosmic rule out there that says I can take it back. There’s no acceptance, no forgiving or forgetting, just the fact that Annie tried and failed for years to grind into my head with every gruesome punishment she handed down to every double-crosser.

Someone’s got to pay. Someone’s _always_ got to pay.

I had the chance to collect what was due, and I was too weak to take it.

That weakness _eats_ at me, sits in my chest and festers, won’t even calm once the sun in blazing hot in the sky and Jean stirs against my chest, looking up at me through bleary amber eyes. “I think the train’s slowing down.”

“Must be coming into a station somewhere,” I nod, brushing his messy hair back from his face before I get up and walk across the car to where Connie’s sitting. “We should poke around and see what we’re dealin’ with.”

“I’ve known for hours, man. Look at these boxes.” He stretches his arms up over his head and nods at the scant pile of packages in the corner of the car, all stamped with the same logo. “It’s an REA train. Parcel deliveries, that sort of thing.”

That’s enough to work with. “Let’s go.”

“And do what, steal some poor bastard’s care package from his mother?”

“It’s an REA train, Connie. Parcel deliveries, mail services, and _money orders.”_ He gives me a blank look, and I sigh, rubbing at my temples. “Somewhere on this train, there’ll be a big old lockbox full of cash from Wells Fargo. If we find it, we won’t have to worry about the fact that all of our money is sittin’ back in Missouri.”

“Wasn’t the point of hopping the train to throw Smith and Ackerman off our trail?” Jean yawns, getting up and grumbling about his stiff limbs before he walks over to join us. “If we rob the damn thing, it’s kinda counterproductive.”

“The point of hopping the train was to put enough distance between Smith and Ackerman and us to give us a head start.” I try to shove down the things that have been haunting me since we left, but they’re stubborn. They crawl up my throat and commandeer my tongue and use me like a puppet. “I don’t know about y’all, but I’m done hiding.”

Connie scrubs a hand down the side of his face and looks at me wearily. “You’re gonna do this whether we go along with it or not, aren’t you?”

“Very perceptive of you.”

“You’re crazy, you’re a pain in my ass, and I do _not_ agree with this,” he snaps, pulling open one of the bags to yank out a pistol. “Jean, stay here with Sasha.”

“I’m coming with—“

“The hell you are. I’ve got no plans to leave my wife alone on a train headed God knows where.”

Jean looks like he might fight about it for a second, but then he looks over at Sasha and sighs, leaning into me and winding his arms tight around my waist. “Be careful, you two.”

“We’ll be back by the time the train pulls in,” I promise, holding him close for a moment and wishing the calm it brings me could last after I let him go.

It doesn’t, though. It’s right back to darkness and troubled thoughts the moment Connie and I walk out of the car.

“Is it really worth the risk, man? Is it _really_ worth it?” Connie grumbles, pulling the door closed behind him, shutting us off in the dry, roaring wind between the cargo cars.

“We’re gonna be gettin’ off this train in unfamiliar territory with no car, the clothes on our backs, and the guns in our hands. The cash is a good fallback for a shitty situation,” I call over the clicking rattle of the wheels, hopping over to the next car and peeking through the window in the door to make sure the coast is clear before sliding it open. “So yeah, it is.”

“I hate when you logic at me – Jesus, _Mary_ and Joseph.” He goes to follow my footsteps but looks down at the last second, gripping the railing like a vice and sucking in a breath.

I scoff, reaching out an arm to help him across. “Just look straight ahead, Connie; you’ll be fine.”

Connie grabs my hand and jumps over, calling me ten kinds of crazy bastard as we make our way through the next few cars, more empty space and piles of Railway Express packages. “So do you have any idea where this lockbox is gonna be, or are you just shootin’ in the dark?”

“Probably somewhere close to the front of the train. They hire guards to travel with them—“

“Oh, _great!_ ”

“—and it’ll be near a sleeper car where the guard’s probably already piss drunk and passed out, Connie, calm yourself!” I finish, stopping before the next door and turning around to talk him down from whatever stick he’s got up his ass about this whole thing. “He’s guarding a big, intimidating lockbox of money on a train full of packages. It’s easy. There’s no way he takes his job seriously.”

“You wanna give me the actual odds for that, or are you just talking out your ass?” Connie asks, hopping over to the next car.

“Mostly just talking out my ass and hoping I’m right, but if I’m wrong, we can play it by ear.”

He laughs, and it sounds almost like him, a little bit of the old recklessness in it when he grins and shakes his head at me. “You’re gonna be the death of me, Marco.”

“Don’t be so melodramatic.” This car’s set up differently, more organized than the others, and I stop paying attention to the conversation, combing up through the aisle of boxes in search of something that stands out.

“Melode-huh?”

 _“Jackpot.”_ I stop short, and Connie walks right into my back.

The lockbox is _huge,_ the size of a steamer trunk at least, secured to the floor of the train by thick metal bands that latch together where the lid meets the body. Big means lots of cash, but it also presents its own set of challenges.

“Well, so much for just taking the box off the train with us,” Connie hums, giving voice to one of my list of concerns.

“Yeah, I figured…” I nod, crouching down to get a better look at the locks. “We could shoot the latches off, but the noise would be bad.”

“Knock ‘em off with something heavy?”

“You see any hammers around here?”

Before the argument can go any further, the door at the end of the car bangs open, a tall guy in a Western Union uniform barging into the car. Gun on his belt, but he’s not reaching for it yet. No one following him. About a second to figure out a course of action. “Hey! What the hell are you—“

The revolver’s smoking in my hand before I even really think of pulling it out, and the guard crumples to the ground, a hideous, gurgling sound rising around the bullet hole in his neck. I’d been aiming higher. Didn’t have enough time to practice back in Joplin.

Connie recoils in horror, shrinking back against the wall so the pooling blood doesn’t get on his shoes. “Marco, Jesus _fuck!_ ”

I feel _nothing._ There’s none of the consuming guilt that haunted me for ages the first time I killed someone, none of the awful pressure clamping down on my chest and throat when I stand there looking at the carnage. There’s no guilt, but there’s no rush either, nothing even close to what I felt in that eternal second when there had been about five yards between the end of my gun and Levi Ackerman’s skull. I stand there, and I look at the man I just shot, and I acknowledge that I did it, watch the light in his eyes flicker and go out.

And I feel _nothing._

Now I know exactly what it is that I’ve lost. I wish I still had enough of it left for the realization to terrify me.

“I told you there’d be a guard,” I say, voice even. Casual.

“Yeah, but you never said you’d—“ BANG. BANG. “What are you _doing?_ ”

The latches fall off the box with metallic jingles, blackened edges matching the twin bullet holes that loosened them. I shrug the empty bag off my shoulder and haul the lid up, not even bothering with counting the stacks of cash inside the lockbox before I start throwing them into the bag. “Finishing the job. No time to stand here and talk about it.”

“You didn’t have to shoot him!” Connie croaks, rooted to the floor. Useless.

“There’s no fuckin’ _time,_ Connie!” Shoving him back from the box, I pay no mind to how he trips over his own feet, too focused on finishing up and getting out. Someone heard those gunshots. “Either help or get outta the way!”

“Oh God. Oh God, I think he’s dead. I’m gonna be sick.”

The bag won’t hold any more money. I sling it back over my shoulder and grab Connie by the back of his shirt and growl, “Come _on!_ ”

And we run. We run away from the crime we just committed and the corpse I just made, and this is how far we’ve come, from pilfering the neighbor’s chickens to grand larceny and a murder that doesn’t even weigh on my soul the way it should. We run back up through the train cars, and I only think about the blood on my shoes in the interest of scraping it off, hopping over to the cargo car when Jean and Sasha are waiting, giving pause before I go back in. The train is almost at a dead stop.

“Don’t tell Jean,” I sigh, hand stilling over the door.

“Why,” Connie asks, “because you know he’d be horrified, and with good reason?”

“Because I’m askin’ you to do me a favor, Connie, and after selling me out to Annie and giving this whole shitshow way more fuel than its fire needed, you owe me one,” I hiss, dredging up shit from way too long ago to make a solid argument, shit that I didn’t realize until now that I still haven’t forgiven.

“Don’t you turn this on me!”

“Just keep your mouth shut, okay?”

“You know how worried he’s been about you?” I’m about to yank open the door, but the words and the waver to Connie’s voice as he says them make me stop, turning back around to look at the horror I never wanted to see on my best friend’s face when he looked at me. “He’s been a goddamn _wreck_ , Marco, and when he ain’t busy blaming himself for what happened to you, he’s talkin’ to Sasha about how scared he is, saying he feels like something’s changed between you two. And we tried to make him feel better, y’know, tried to tell him that you were fine and that it was all in his head. But you _have_ changed.”

He says it like it’s an accusation. Like it’s _my fault._

“Yeah. It’s almost like I took a plate glass window to the face and finally realized that I don’t owe most of the people in this world jack shit.” I laugh, and it’s so cold that my throat burns in its wake, the hand that was reaching for the door balling into a fist. “I’m _done_ giving people mercy that they’d never offer me. Playin’ nice don’t get you any points in the long run. It just gets you dead.”

And Connie, the bastard, has the nerve to stand there and look _disappointed._ “The Marco I know wouldn’t justify killing a man with an excuse like that.”

“The Marco you know got his fool ass killed back in Dallas!” I snarl, balling a hand up in the front of his shirt and shoving him back against the wall of the cargo car. “You either live with the current state of affairs, or you hit the road and see how you do on your own.”

Connie just stands there and watches me, very calm for someone who’s one wrong word away from a fist in their face. I almost want him to say something, almost want him to start a fight, but instead he just snorts and shoves my hand away and says, “Not much of a choice, is it?”

I’ve let him down. I wonder what it’s like, having someone you care about turning on you feel like a new experience instead of the same old song and dance.

“I mean it. Not a word to Jean,” I whisper, throwing the door open and remembering to play my part when I walk back inside. “All right, everyone, look alive. We’re gettin’ off this train.”

“You actually found the lockbox?” Jean asks, surprised.

I drop the bag at his feet, pulling it open to show him the haul. “What d’you think?”

“Jesus, that’s more than we’ve pulled in the past three months.”

“Big jobs, darlin’. The risk factor has its benefits,” I shrug, popping the latch on the cargo door and peeking outside. Nothing but empty track. The station’s a good distance ahead.

“Yeah, apparently,” he nods, leaning over to sift through the cash and letting out a low whistle.

“All clear,” I call back to the rest of them, sliding the door back far enough to hop down onto the tracks and waving them out. “C’mon, hurry.”

Once we’re all disembarked and hiding in the shadow of the train, Sasha wrings her hands and asks, “What do we do now?”

“We figure out where we are, we get our hands on a vehicle, and we hit the road,” I answer, wondering how we can get a read on our location without drawing too much attention to ourselves.

“Well, I’ve got the first part of that,” says Jean, far more nervous than he should be while delivering good news. “That’s the Trinity River. We’re in Dallas.”

I blink at him. “You’re _joking_.”

“’Fraid not.”

“Had to be Dallas, didn’t it?” No one says anything, because they’re probably all thinking the same. “Always has to be goddamned Dallas.”

“Well, at least we’re in familiar territory,” Sasha offers, and shit’s _really_ bad if she’s the one trying to be the voice of optimism.

“Familiar territory where everyone knows our faces! How in the hell are we gonna get our hands on a car now?”

Jean shifts his weight, eyes glued to his shoes. “I know a way.”

Well, it’s better than what I’ve got, which is a whole metric shit-ton of nothing. My reservoir of genius plans is completely exhausted after getting us out of Joplin, and I’m more than ready to take someone else’s suggestions for once. “Please, Jean, share with the class.”

He slaps a hand to his forehead and groans, “Eren’s gonna kill me.”

Any suggestion except for that.

“No. Absolutely not.”

Jean frowns at me, and his disappointment hits home harder than Connie’s, the little bit of hurt in his voice corrosive. “He saved your life, and you still don’t trust him?”

“He didn’t save my life to do _me_ any favors,” I grumble, not meeting his gaze. “And it ain’t that I don’t trust him. I’m afraid that they’ll be watching the garage.”

“He’s got my old truck,” he points out. “He drove it to my house that night.”

“Yeah, _months ago_ —“

“And if we can get a car without stealing one and get outta town, then we’re completely off the map. They’ve got no way to trace us. Pull your horns in for a second and think about it.”

I don’t want to think about it. I want to get the hell out of this death trap city and find somewhere quiet to sit and collect myself and try to let everything I just did hit me the way it’s supposed to, try to convince myself that my sense of humanity didn’t actually get ripped out of me along with my eye, that looking like a monster doesn’t have to mean acting like one. I don’t want to be the one calling the shots. Not in this state.

But Jean can’t know that “this state” is a problem, so I stiffen my shoulders and nod and say, “Yeah, all right.”

And I shut off. I shut off, because it’s the only thing I know to do at this point.

I’m so numb that a frankly dangerous trip across Dallas via back alleys and side streets doesn’t even register to me, the world blurring and undulating around me, only clearing at the focal points where Jean’s hand touches mine. It’s like driving a familiar road when you’re tired, like how you lose track at one place and end up pulling up to another with no idea of the in-between. We’re standing in the alley beside the garage, and I don’t recall getting there.

“How’s it look?” Connie asks, trying to peek around Jean’s back to get a better look at the street.

“Lobby’s empty, doors are closed,” Jean hums, drumming his fingers against the crumbling brick of the building he’s leaning against. “No business, but the ‘open’ sign’s still up.”

“We can’t just walk in through the front door on a busy street,” I warn, paranoid all of a sudden. It’s this place. It’s everything about Dallas, how the red string of fate has become a noose around my neck and keeps dragging me back to this shithole, over and over and over again, and every time I set foot here I lose another part of myself. The first time, it was my heart. Then it was my plans. Then it was my eye and my usefulness and some part of my soul that’s hollow and warped now. I don’t want to know what I’m going to lose this time if I don’t get out fast enough.

“We’re not going to,” says Jean, pulling something out of his pocket with a metallic jingle.

“What in the _hell_ are those?”

“My keys.”

Connie, Sasha, and I all gape at him. “We’ve been runnin’ all over the country, how many close calls, how many things we had to drop, and you still have your keys for work?”

He just shrugs, spinning the keyring around his finger. “Good thing I held onto ‘em, huh?”

“Unbelievable.”

“C’mon, hurry up,” Sasha hisses, prodding the three of us out of the alley and into the somewhat secluded back lot of the garage. Jean slides his key into the latch on one of the doors, and thank God Eren’s a cheap bastard who didn’t think to change the locks, because it slides right up, a familiar, dusty rumble.

The garage is still and empty, save for a Model A parked in one far corner. New model, nice, doesn’t even look old enough to have anything wrong with it. Jean pulls the door shut behind him and lets the silence settle, nothing but the muted sound of traffic outside and a weird creak from somewhere that could just be the old building settling on its foundation.

“Where the hell is he?” Jean whispers, peeking out into the lobby with me behind him before he calls into the abandoned space. “Eren?”

Something big crashes to the floor, followed by a tide of muffled cursing, leaking under the closed door behind the front desk.

 _“Shit!”_ Eren sounds panicked, shuffling around and dropping something else by the sound of it. “Just a – _would you stop it_ – second!”

“Sounds like he’s in the office,” Jean frowns, hopping over the desk and reaching for the doorknob.

The door flies open before Jean can touch it, though, and Eren edges out, slamming it behind him. He’s a fucking mess, hair sticking up at weird angles and shirt buttoned crooked, panting like he just ran a marathon, face flushed bright pink. He gets one look at Jean and I and goes pale faster than I thought was scientifically possible. “Oh _Christ,_ not you two.”

“Nice to see you too, Eren,” Jean huffs.

You would think that the Bodt Gang had suddenly taken on the role of the Four Horsemen of the Goddamn Apocalypse with the way Eren looks at us, running a hand back through his messy hair and starting to pace once he rounds the front of the desk. “You could give a man some warning.”

“This wasn’t exactly a planned visit,” I point out. He doesn’t even glare at me. What fresh hell is this?

Jean’s the one that gives me a disapproving look, like he’s chiding me for trying to start something when Eren, for once in his life, doesn’t even seem to be interested in going at it with me. I shrug at him, and he turns back to watch Eren pace, reaching out to grab his shoulder the next time he passes. “Listen, Eren, you reserve every right to kick my ass for this, but we’re in a bit of a tight spot and—“

“No, actually, there’s, uh… We should be in the garage. Windows.” Eren practically herds the four of us out into the garage, a nervous little tic to his smile – Eren knows how to smile? – and a hysterical edge to his laugh before he starts talking again, too stuttered and fragmented to make any sense. “Y’all have been gone for a long time. And without a way to contact you, y’see… There’s a… There’s a _thing_ that happened.”

He’s looking right at me as he says this. _Shit._

“What’re you lookin’ at me for?” The real question is do I even want to know?

Eren laughs again, looking for all the world like he wants nothing more than to run away screaming. “Okay, I just need everyone to stay calm. This is a delicate situation and I think we need to handle it like—“

Whatever he was going to end with gets lost in an impact that knocks the air out of me, someone moving so fast through the door from the lobby that I can’t even process what happens until I’ve got a fist wadded up in my shirt collar and I’m getting slammed against the nearest wall by six-foot-four of pure, concentrated _rage._ “You _stupid_ sonuvabitch.”

I wheeze in a gasp through stuttering lungs, my unsteady mind taking in little details one at a time. Expensive suit and gold cufflinks, the silk tie done up a little crooked, hair a little out of place. Dark eyes narrowed to angry slashes, freckles smattered across cheekbones and lips curled into a snarl.

I choke out a laugh, the best challenge I can present. “Don’t talk about Ma that way, Mick, it ain’t polite.”

Michael scowls, shoving me away from him and looking like he’s liable to kick my ass if I say another word. “You’ve really stepped in it this time, baby brother.”

Yeah, I reckon I have.


	24. Jean

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so, so, so, SO sorry this took so long. Between finishing school, moving into a new apartment, and starting a new job, things have been kind of hectic. I should probably also take the opportunity to inform y'all that after this chapter, I'll be leaving ATSIT alone for a little bit so I can get some work done on my other project, [The Gifted.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2891591/chapters/6454901) Please check it out! ATSIT 25 should pop up somewhere around the end of June/the beginning of July.
> 
> Other important things: I make pretty direct lyrical references to [Polarize](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiPBQJq49xk) by twenty one pilots and [The Literal Heart](http://pennyandsparrow.bandcamp.com/track/the-literal-heart) by Penny and Sparrow this chapter. Listen to them while reading and cry with me.
> 
> It's finally here. The Micheren Smorgasbord. Enjoy it, babies. You earned it.
> 
> I have a [tumblr.](http://southspinner.tumblr.com)

_“What.”_

Eren buries his face in his hands. “Oh my God.”

“No, but really, _what._ ”

The stress and fatigue – and the five long months they’ve been sitting heavy on my shoulders – have slowed down my brain, making it hard to process anything beyond the initial thought that Marco just got pinned against the wall by a taller, better-dressed Marco. I’d missed most of their exchange in the original panic, and between the sneer curling at Marco’s lips and Eren’s look of utter mortification, I think I’ve missed quite a bit.

Marco scoffs and brushes the wrinkles out of his shirt, glaring for all he’s worth. “Remember what I told you about my brother Michael?”

_“What.”_

Michael Bodt grins, and some of the family resemblance disappears. His smile is different. It’s slyer, more dangerous, not so much the Cheshire Cat as the Sphinx on the verge of devouring its prey. “You talk about me? That’s sweet of you.”

“Nothin’ good, I promise,” Marco growls, a tension in his voice that tugs every syllable into a sharpened point. There’s something going on here that everyone but me knows the gravity of, hanging thick in the air like the humidity rising after a summer storm. Connie grabs Sasha’s hand and ushers her out the side door into the alley beside the garage, withdrawing from the conflict before they can be tugged into it. I don’t have that choice, firstly because I’m not willing to leave Marco, and secondly because I’ve got Michael standing between me and the exit.

Marco’s brother is built differently than he is. He’s _tall,_ so tall that he looks almost comical standing next to Eren, but not as sturdy as Marco. His silhouette is still strong, but leaner, a narrow waist and narrow shoulders outlined by a well-tailored suit, rich fabric and clean-pressed seams that would have been pricey for me even back in the days when I could afford to dress like that. Michael’s features are sharper, too, high cheekbones and a pointed chin and eyes so dark they’re almost reflective, a perpetual smirk lingering on his lips. A more charitable person might say that he has a clever look about him. I think he looks sort of like a weasel.

The freckles are the same, though. The freckles, and the laugh, a smooth tenor that rings in the dusty air of the garage as he leans back against the workbench and his grin widens, the little mole at the corner of his mouth disappearing into a dimple. “Been a while.”

“Five years,” says Marco, the very antithesis of amusement.

“I’d say you’re lookin’ good, but, well…” Michael trails off, making a vague gesture at Marco’s eyepatch and filthy clothes.

“Lying’s your strong suit anyway. I could use the compliment.”

Michael raises an eyebrow, his levity fading a bit. “I don’t know, brother mine, I never spun a lie big enough to let me come back from the dead twice. You’ve set the bar pretty high.”

A vein pulsing in his temple, Marco crosses his arms tight across his chest and snaps, “What do you want, Mick?”

“Right now, a stiff drink and a million dollars,” he shrugs, but then all pretense of joking goes out the window, his eyes narrowing as he darts forward and plants a sharp, solid shove against Marco’s shoulders, knocking him back a few steps. “Long term, I’d like to convince you to _stop robbing folks before you get yourself killed._ ”

“Why do you give a shit?” Marco snarls, shoving him back.

“Because you’re my brother, and it’s always been my job to bail your dumb ass out when you get in over your head!”

“Didn’t do too good of a job five years ago.”

Whatever that means, it’s enough to stop Michael in his tracks, the hurt loaded in it hitting him with a physical force. He stops halfway to a retort, shoulders hunching, curling into himself and looking at Marco with wide eyes and open hands, almost _plaintive._ “I… God, Marco, listen to me, if I’d known…”

Marco barks out a cold, empty laugh, using his brother’s lapse in anger to fuel his own, pushing into his personal space with fists balled up at his sides. “Yeah, well ‘if I’d known’ won’t do nobody any good, will it? We promised we were gonna get outta that shithole together, and then you fuckin’ _left_ —“

“I was tryin’ to do what was best for you!”

“You’ve always been more interested in your own benefit; don’t try to bullshit me!”

And that’s enough to set both of them off, Marco rearing back for a solid punch to Michael’s face as Michael fists a hand in his shirt again, hissing, “You got no room to talk, you little—“

“Both of you stop it!” Eren’s so small compared to the two of them that he has to use the fact that they’re solely focused on each other to wriggle between them and shove them apart, defusing the situation while all I can do is stand there still trying to pick my jaw up off the floor. Marco takes a step back, all mutinous grumbling and narrowed eyes, but Eren sticks closer to Michael, a hand planted against the center of his chest and a long, warning look aimed up at him before he finally takes a step back. “You cause any collateral damage on my garage from a fistfight, and I’ll take it outta both your hides. Simmer down and talk like civilized goddamn human beings.”

And by some fucking miracle, they both obey. Marco might still not be too fond of Eren, but there’s something to be said for the word of a person whose blood still flows through your veins, and Marco’s always had his own crooked code of honor. Eren saved his life. In Marco’s book, that makes him worth listening to. What I can’t figure out is what Eren’s done to make Michael Bodt – who seems like he’s not in the habit of listening to _anyone_ – rock back on his heels and abandon his anger like a chastised child, looking from Eren to the floor and chewing on the inside of his cheek.

“What’re you doing here?” Marco asks after a long, uncomfortable silence.

Michael rolls his eyes. “Waiting for you. I thought we addressed this.”

“Yeah, but why _here?_ ”

“You’re not easy to track down, kid,” he says, a dodge around the question, its only fault the second it takes for him to look over at Eren, who gives a small, almost imperceptible shake of his head. “Even Miles couldn’t do it.”

“Miles was lookin’ for us?” And Marco takes the bait. I shouldn’t be as surprised by that as I am. From everything I’ve heard about Michael, he’s somewhat of a professional swindler, and he’s got an entire childhood’s worth of know-how when it comes to derailing Marco’s train of thought from the things that really matter. And he does it with so much finesse that it’s almost _artful,_ that I’d almost admire him for it if I weren’t so busy entertaining a detailed mental image of smashing a right hook into his jaw. Marco’s had his head messed with enough, but that doesn’t stop his brother from pulling all the right strings, turning Marco’s attention to the details, giving himself the room to nudge him down a different tangent.

“And doing a shit job, yeah,” Michael snorts, exchanging a loaded look with Marco that’s almost good-natured for a few seconds before Marco remembers himself and goes back to scowling. “The difference between me and Miles is that Miles has to play by the rules. I don’t. If I wanted to find you, I could go directly to the source.”

The realization dawns on Marco after a beat, and his mouth falls open, dumbfounded disbelief meeting Michael’s expectant smirk. “You gave Annie the newspaper.”

He nods, inspecting the polish on his cufflinks. “That information came at the price of my honor, I’ll have you know. Annie Leonhart is one hell of a woman.”

“Oh God, you _didn’t._ ”

Michael looks back up with a wolfish grin, not answering the inquiry and not needing to. “At any rate, the most I got from her was that you two had been in a garage in West Dallas before you came her way. So I came up here, started sniffing around, and followed your trail all the way back here. Eren was… less than accommodating, at first.”

“I threw a wrench at him,” says Eren.

“You threw several wrenches and an empty toolbox at me.”

“Details.”

Eren shrugs and _smiles,_ and that’s such a strange experience that it shocks me back into action, stumbling for my grip on my words. I’ve already decided that Michael Bodt’s a manipulative bastard and I don’t like him, but it takes one to know one, and I might have the advantage here. Marco’s smart, but he’s tangled up in family ties that are only coming back tighter and more unpleasant after five years. I’m seeing the situation objectively – of course I’m seeing it objectively, of course I am, the fact that the weasel-faced son of a bitch is smiling back at Eren like the sun shines out of his every orifice and it’s making my skin crawl is only further proof that he’s up to something, I am as objective as Lady Justice herself – and that might be our ticket out of it unscathed.

“So what, you just waited here?” I ask, trying to crunch numbers in my head. If he gave Annie the newspaper and then came to Dallas, that would put him here about five months ago, just after we left. Five months. Why would he wait here for five months on something that wasn’t guaranteed to happen?

“You were bound to come back to Dallas sometime,” says Michael, acknowledging my existence for the first time. He looks at me like I’m something slimy that crawled out from beneath a rock, which is rich, coming from him. But after a second, his look of distaste melts into a shit-eating grin, and he flings an arm around Eren’s shoulders, tugging him closer to his side, not breaking eye contact with me the entire time. “And we get along _famously_ now. No more flying wrenches.”

“I threw a wrench at you three days ago,” Eren deadpans.

“Details.”

It’s hard to see in the dim light of the garage and the angle he’s standing at, but there’s a little twitch in Eren’s expression, a hitch in his throat that he turns into a cough. He’s fighting back laughter. I try to remember the last time I saw Eren honestly laugh, and come up with a blank slate.

I don’t pursue the reasoning behind why I feel like kicking myself and shift all that blame festering in my chest outwards instead, because I’ll be incapacitated if I don’t. “And you decided to keep this to yourself, Eren?”

Rather than Eren answering for it, it’s Michael who sticks his stupid pointy nose in where it doesn’t belong, crossing his arms and snapping, “He couldn’t exactly drop you a letter. The only information sources we had were the papers. Not his fault you used his barn like a hospital and then fucked off to God-knows-where.”

“I was asking _Eren_.”

“Yeah, well, Eren would give you an answer that’s more polite than you deserve.”

“Mick,” says Eren, almost a whisper, not so much a warning as a request as he reaches up across the height difference to close a hand around Michael’s arm. Something unspoken passes between them; a language of weighted looks and tense nods, and then Michael looks back at me with a derisive snort, backing off for the time being.

“When did he show up?” I ask Eren, jerking my head in Michael’s direction and earning another glare.

“He comes and goes. Michael’s got his own business, but when he’s here, he’s my new front desk clerk. Remember the shady guy with the self-inflicted damage on his Model A? He came back in two weeks later and formally introduced himself.”

Five months. Just like I thought. Something doesn’t fit here. There’s a hole in any logic that would lead to someone who’s supposed to be clever wasting that much time on a lead that might not have gone anywhere. He’s got an ulterior motive; he has to. His last name’s Bodt, and there’s something in that blood that won’t stay in one place without reason or an outside force. I don’t trust anything about this, but I’m too tired and frazzled to figure it out beyond a warning buzz in the back of my head when I tilt my head at Michael Bodt and hum, “Been here a while, then?”

“Don’t see how that’s any of your damn business,” he drawls, and there’s a hint of Marco’s anger in him, the stiff shoulders and set jaws something they share.

“You’re involved in this, so that _makes_ it my damn business!” Call it exhaustion or apprehension or simply having a short fuse. Maybe it’s just the outlaw in me, that streak of defiance that’s grown into something that makes me do stupid things like rob trains and drive cars through gunfire – or, apparently, talk shit to someone twice my size. “If you got a problem with it, feel free to take it up with me.”

Marco groans and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Jean, don’t—“

But Michael’s already on his way across the room, grinning like he’s just been presented with the opportunity of a lifetime, shedding his jacket and and rolling up his sleeves. “Don’t mind if I do.”

I wasn’t a scrapper, even as a kid. Ninette got all of the fight that probably should have been distributed between us. It was always her getting in trouble at the drop of a hat, whether it was biting her nannies when she was a toddler or breaking the Wagner boy’s nose over a game of sandlot baseball. The only physical altercations I ever got into growing up were mostly harmless tussles with Eren, and he was almost always the one who started it. I don’t really even know how to throw a proper punch, and I have the misfortune to remember that in the wake of all six-foot-something of an impending ass-whipping stalking towards me.

Thank God for Eren, who keeps up with his track record of pulling me out of nasty situations, stepping between the two of us with a withering glare that could probably melt steel. “Would you two put your rulers away and button your pants already? Jesus.”

“Think we all know who’d win that contest,” Michael mutters.

“Mick!”

There’s something… _off_ in the way that Eren gravitates toward him, a familiarity that shouldn’t be there in how they look at each other for too long, doing that silent language thing again. Michael scowls. Eren purses his lips and tilts his head to the side. Michael whispers something under his breath, a string of words of which I only catch a clipped _he’s got it comin’_. Eren scoops the abandoned jacket off the floor and offers it to him, a shake of his head, the wordless _it’s not worth it_ that I’ve seen him give me before. Michael swallows hard and sighs and takes it from him, giving Eren’s arm a little squeeze before he slips the jacket back on. I have ceased to exist, save for a look of pure _loathing_ that I get before the Brothers Bodt go back to their previous conversation.

“You’ve still got a lotta nerve, coming back here after the shit you pulled,” says Marco.

Michael sighs, running a hand back through his hair and messing up the dark curls even further. “I messed up. Is that what you wanna hear? I messed up, and I’m sorry.”

For all of the knowing Marco that he probably has on me, Michael apparently doesn’t know that apologizing to him is about the worst thing you can do when he’s angry. Marco _seethes,_ winding himself back up again in a second’s time, all those long-suffering grievances surfacing with an enraged rebuke hissed out through clenched teeth. “Sorry don’t do _shit._ Sorry couldn’t save me from gettin’ the tar beaten outta me, sorry couldn’t keep me away from months livin’ off scraps while you were up in Chicago laughin’ all the way to the damn _bank_ , you piece of—“

“You ever think that you weren’t the only one with something to hide?!” Silence. Dead silence. Michael grimaces and swallows too-late around the crack in his voice. Marco stands there, immobile, an expression of horrified understanding writing itself across his face while his brother just shakes his head in time with a bitter laugh. “Christ, you’re blind. I didn’t drive off into the night laughing about leaving you behind. It was a rough start. Lots of nights sleepin’ in my car with an empty belly. I didn’t want that for you.”

“Would’ve been better than what happened to me in the end.”

“And I didn’t know about any of that! Maybe if you’d trusted your brother instead of waiting for shit to go sideways, things would’ve been different!”

He has to know as well as I do, as well as Marco does, as well as Eren does, that the ‘if’s of life mean less than nothing, and yet he still clings to them. The only place that considering the could-have-beens will ever get you is an endless spiral of pointless wishing, nostalgia for the times you never even had. I should know. I spent long months doing nothing but keeping company with a whole slew of my almost-lives, wondering what would have happened if we hadn’t tried to rob that bank, if I hadn’t insisted we come back to Dallas in the first place. You go looking for comfort in all those things you should have done, but you never find it. It keeps dancing just beyond your fingertips, and the farther you chase it, the farther you get from reality.

But maybe that’s what Michael Bodt wants. I’ve grown so tired of life down the rabbit hole that sometimes it’s hard for me to remember that some people would rather cling to fairytales and hollow reassurances that they were in the right.

“I was gonna come back for you, Marco,” he says, nodding slowly, like he’s trying to convince himself of a truth only he knows. “I was always gonna come back for you. But things happened, and by the time I had the money to come back to Telico, I was coming back for your funeral. I could’ve kept you from all that by taking you with me to begin with, and I’ve gotta live with that.”

“Pardon me for not shedding a tear of sympathy, _brother mine_.” Marco colors the endearment in a mockery of the tone Michael had said it with before, unmoved by his brother’s regret, whether it’s genuine or not. “I’ve got some scars that are a little nastier than your guilt.”

“Oh, and you’re blameless, is that it?” asks Michael, fists balling up at his sides. Standing next to him, Eren glances up at the ceiling like he’s praying for patience and the providence to make it so that he doesn’t have to break up another fight. Michael huffs out another acidic laugh, taking a step towards Marco before Eren dutifully yanks him back. “Out there moaning on and on about all the wrong the big bad world’s done you, and you let the people who could’ve helped you think you were dead.”

“Don’t you start.” He’s all write-offs and steadfast rage, at least to the untrained eye, but underneath all of that, Marco falters for a moment. There’s the briefest flash of a strange, hopeful hurt across his face, a tragedy he _wants_ to be true. But he throws it off of him like a long-carried weight; shaking his head and making his gaze go hard again. “None of you ever gave a shit. Don’t pretend like you do now.”

“Maddox named his oldest boy Marco, you know that?” Marco stops mid-argument, his mouth hanging open. This must all be so raw to him, so hard-hitting, but from my spot in the spectator’s section, I can see how it’s all calculated, Michael’s reserve weapon to keep him hooked if he tried to deny his way out of the confrontation. “We never could figure out why Pa was so livid about it.”

Marco shakes his head again, hard, the way a person will when they’re trying to clear the ringing from their ears. “If Maddox knew the truth, he—“

“Maddox _does_ know the truth! They all do, thanks to someone plastering you and _this_ piece of work,” Michael hisses, pointing at me, “all over the papers! And you know what? _He doesn’t care._ What he does care about is the fact that you ran off and let us all lay flowers on an empty grave for five years.”

And there it is, the flourish, the piece de la resistance. I’ve watched the impossible happen, a turnaround that defies the laws of everything I know. Once Marco’s set in his ways with something, he’s _set in his ways,_ and that goes double for grudges. He’s blamed Michael for years, and in the space of a few minutes, I’ve watched Michael take that blame and spin it and flip it around until it crashes down on Marco’s shoulders so hard that I could swear I see his knees buckle.

If I didn’t want to knock him in the head with a socket wrench, I’d take the time to appreciate the skill that must take. The man’s an artist.

“What was I supposed to do?” Marco asks after a beat, much softer than he probably means to be.

“You could’ve come home. You could’ve sent a letter. Anything.” For all that artistry of his, Michael looks just as weary, just as worn – just as _hurt._ Maybe it’s a gift that comes with a price, being able to tug at strings and have people feel what you want and do what you want. God knows I’ve learned that my own abilities with it take a toll. I tell myself not to feel sorry for him, but for a moment, it’s actually sort of hard, watching the way he looks at Marco like someone forced to look at a car crash, fixed on the wreckage and wondering if there was anything they could have done to stop it. “You could’ve let us know that you were alive, and you chose not to, so don’t put that on us and say we didn’t care when you’re the one who never gave enough of a shit to let us show you how much we did.”

“It was easier to be the dead brother you loved than the living one you hated.” Marco spits the words out with a barely-concealed waver beneath them, fighting back the helplessness like he did back in Joplin, halfway to a mental break over a gun that wouldn’t come alive in his hand the way it used to. He’s never been too good with facing his own brokenness, glazing it over with sharp smiles and a bravado that rarely falters. Marco can’t handle staring his own could-have-beens down, and maybe that’s why he’s always run so fast and far, trying to keep them from catching up.

I’ve got no right to talk, though. After everything that’s happened, I finally realize why running feels so good. You’re never really free, not when you’ve got nightmares like we do, but sometimes the wind in your face and the road beneath your tires can give you a few precious gasps of open air before it all comes crashing down again. Somewhere in the mire of all our guilt and loss, it got harder to pick our feet up. Now we’re just slogging through it, the both of us, trying not to suffocate.

A strangled cry of exasperation colliding with the backs of his teeth, Michael drags a hand down the side of his face before gesturing wildly in his brother’s direction and shouting, “No one _cares_ who you fuck, Marco! We’re more concerned with you committing armed robbery on a weekly basis!”

“You can’t get mad at him for taking steps to keep himself safe!” It’s not my place. I don’t have a dog in this fight, not really, but I’ve lost count of the number of times Marco’s gone up to bat for me when I felt far too fragile to stand on my own. And maybe it hasn’t always been this way, maybe it hasn’t always been me taking a stand and giving him something steady to lean on, but I’ve got a hell of a lot of practice under my belt, and my silence refuses to sit well with me now that I’ve found my voice. “You don’t know what it’s like to have to deal with the backlash for that sort of shit. Maybe instead of being so bitter that your brother doesn’t trust you, you should ask yourself why.”

“You don’t get to tell me what I do and don’t know,” Michael all but whispers, and there’s something even more intimidating in that than if he’d decided to yell at me instead. I’ve heard his tone of voice before. It’s the same one that Dad used on that hunting trip he dragged me on when I was a kid, the one that made me sick at the sight of blood for the rest of my life, a low lull meant to keep the deer in place right before he slit its throat. “And you’re hardly the man to lecture me on having a less-than-perfect family, Kirschtein. You’ve made a fine mess of yours.”

It’s much different, being on the victim’s end of those emotional blows, engineered to incapacitate and hitting their target with a marksman’s accuracy. Must be something in that Bodt blood. Marco has his bullets, Michael has his words, and they always hit what they aim for. One shot, and I’m rooted to the floor, images flashing through my head, Ninette’s dying smile when she realized I wasn’t home to stay, my mother’s shaking hands, _I don’t know you anymore._ I try to come up with something to refute him, but it’s impossible when all he’s done is dredge up a piece of jagged truth that I’ve been dancing around and shoved it right between my ribs. The reminder’s stuck there now, a stabbing pain when I try to breathe, not a killing blow, but enough to keep me down. Michael stands there watching me with a vague sort of interest that says he really wouldn’t mind watching me bleed out, slow and painful.

But taking a hit myself gave Marco enough time to compose himself, and he jumps back into the fray with a huffed exhalation and a short, “Don’t stand there and pretend you’ve got the high ground, Mick. I can handle self-righteousness from folks who are actually righteous, but on you, it’s just obnoxious.”

There’s an empty space at the end of his words, a worried glance in my direction. He wants to say more, but he won’t, and it takes a moment to realize that it’s because I’m standing here. This isn’t my place. This isn’t my place, and even after all this time, Marco still has things that he won’t tell me. The hurt of that is dulled by the knowledge that nothing will get done as long as I’m standing here bearing witness to whatever family affairs are getting dragged out into the light of day, and by the knowledge that really, I don’t have the right to know. Whatever’s happened with us, there’s still something left of the trust that I’ve always had in Marco against my better judgment, something that’s willing to accept that if there’s anything he won’t say, he probably has a good reason for not saying it. There have been times when I’ve pushed that trust, times when I got him to share those unpleasant truths he likes to hold so close, but this won’t be one of them. I can give him that much peace in a world where he’s starting to forget the meaning of the word.

“We’ll just… leave you two alone,” I mutter, drawing back towards the door to the front room. Eren doesn’t take the cue, though, still hovering beside Michael, worrying his bottom lip between his teeth. There’s a hesitance in his posture that I’ve forced myself to give up, something close to the way it felt leaving Marco’s side even though everything in my was telling me to stay. Watching him like that only makes the pull to go back to a situation where I don’t belong even stronger, to the point that I reach out and grab the doorframe to keep myself in place. “C’mon, Eren.”

“Just ‘cause you treat him like a dog don’t mean he’ll come when you call him,” Michael snaps, so venomous that I actually reel back a bit.

For a brief, foolish space in time, I decide that the integrity of my backbone is more important than the delicate situation at hand. I never asked for any of this. I came here to ask Eren for a favor, something that was going to fuck me up even in the most ideal of circumstances. I never signed up for Marco’s asshole brother showing up out of the blue and trying to pick a fight with me over the direction the wind is blowing, and I sure as _hell_ didn’t sign up for someone to take all that self-blame I’ve been stomping down to stay functional and drag it out without caring if it renders me useless.

“D’you have a problem with me?” Rhetorical question, especially given the fact that he had every intention of laying me out before Eren stepped in, but I’m dying to know what sort of sin I’ve committed that could make a man I’ve never met carry a personal vendetta against me.

“I got a problem with the _shitty_ way you treat the people who care about you,” he says, shoulders tensing, “and I’ll tell you something else—“

“Michael. Please.” Eren doesn’t even have to hold him back this time, bringing a stop to his rant with nothing more than two words and a weary, half-broken sigh. He opens his mouth like he’s going to say something else, but thinks better of it at the last moment, lunging across the garage and grabbing my arm to drag me out into the lobby. “Just… c’mon.”

The last thing I see before the door shuts behind us is a look I know too well on Michael Bodt’s face as he watches Eren go. It’s the way you look after all those things that slip through your fingers, watching them hovering just beyond your reach and wondering if they were ever yours to begin with.

Eren stands in the lobby catching his breath for a second, his hands trembling when he finally moves across the floor and flips the ‘Closed’ sign on the door. “I… We… Fuck, the windows. C’mon.”

I would say it’s been a while since the last time I’ve seen him this shaken, but the last time I saw him, he _was_ this shaken, trying to hold himself together for my sake while Mikasa was working on saving Marco’s life in the wee hours of the morning. Five months have changed us both. I’m a broken framework holding up a crumbling ruin because Marco can’t anymore, and Eren… well, for all his nerves and fleeting glances, he looks _sturdy._ The fragility of the person who’d watched me walk away again and again isn’t here anymore, replaced by a weird brand of apprehension and a sigh that’s more annoyance than sadness as he tugs me behind the desk and into the office.

The place is a mess, even for Eren, who’s probably never inhabited an organized space in his life. I’m used to the clutter and the unfiled papers back here, but I’m not used to them being all over the floor, the desk sitting crooked and the chair knocked over. Eren picks up the closest pile of papers, his cheeks turning pink.

And I get it.

The messy office, the ruckus we heard when we came in, Michael Bodt’s apparent desire to inflict all sorts of pain on me, the way Eren only goes redder as he sees me figuring it out. It all adds up in one moment of clarity, and I could kick myself for not getting it sooner. Eren looks like he wants to kick me for getting it at all.

“What’s going on with you and him?” I ask, jerking my head back towards the door.

Eren’s eyes narrow. “You’ve got no right to ask that.”

Barking out a laugh, I lean back against the displaced desk, arms crossing over my chest. “I think I do. The guy just met me and he hates my guts. This delusion he has about me treatin’ you like shit’s gotta come from somewhere.”

“There ain’t no delusion, Jean,” Eren says softly. When he looks up from the floor at me, he’s making an effort to hold his head high. “You _do_ treat me like shit.”

It was one thing, having a stranger I’ve already decided that I don’t like call me on it. Listening to Eren say it, so casual that he might as well be discussing the weather, is another thing entirely. I want him to be _angry,_ like Michael was, want him to scream and curse and throw things at me. I want him to be angry, because if he says something like that in a fit of rage, I can convince myself that he doesn’t mean it, that it was a vent of frustration spat in the heat of the moment. But he says it with a calm that can only be applied to something that’s been accepted as fact. The grass is green. All living things are made of cells. The world will end someday.

And I treat Eren like shit.

I can’t push things away and pretend they’re not real anymore, and the weight of my own transgressions crushes me.

It’s been a long time since I cried. After the night Marco lost his eye, I thought I’d forgotten how, that no trauma the world threw at me could ever match that. But standing here, feeling like an intruder in a place that used to be home, I come damn close, swallowing the knives in my throat and choking out a thick, “I never meant for any of this to happen. I never wanted…”

Frowning, Eren sets the chair back upright and flops down into it, digging a couple of beers out from the bucket under the desk – I never thought nostalgia was supposed to hurt this much – and tossing me one before twisting the cap off his own and raising it to me in a bittersweet toast. “Road to hell’s paved with good intentions. God knows I never had anything but the best intentions for you, and we see where it got me.”

“And you trust _him_ to fix it?”

“He has a name. You told me that once.”

I did. Standing ten feet away from where I am now, I told him that, thought that I might as well be talking to a brick wall because Eren could never possibly understand how it was, seeing the good in a person that no one else can. One of the most hateful things about having time to examine the things you’ve done is that you start second-guessing yourself. The me of a year ago, the me that thought that, did he really believe it? And if he did, how was he so blind? Out of anyone involved in this madhouse of a situation, Eren understands loving the good in someone’s bad better than anyone.

He loved me. That feat takes either Eren’s unconditional goodness or Marco’s insanity.

“So am I allowed to ask how this,” I huff, waving around at the disarray in the office, “happened?”

“Honestly, I don’t have a fuckin’ clue,” Eren shrugs, kicking his heels up on the edge of the desk, fighting back the ghost of a smile curling at the corners of his lips as he explains. All this time, everything I’ve put him through, and he’s still watching himself around me, guarding every action to cause as little damage as he can. “He came in here lookin’ for information about Marco. I told him to fuck off. He was persistent. After a while, it stopped being irritating and started being kinda cute. And as soon as I let on to that, I couldn’t get rid of him.”

“Charming.”

“Look,” Eren sighs, “Mick’s… a character. But he wants to help. He cares about his brother, and he cares about me, and that’s enough for me to trust him. You should too.”

I scoff down the neck of my bottle and try to ignore the fact that Eren just implied that I _don’t_ care about him. It doesn’t work. The pain sits in my chest, heavy and solid, providing a resting place for the bitterness that lingers on the back of my tongue. “Sorry for not wanting to throw my life into the hands of a guy who clearly wanted to beat the shit outta me five seconds after meeting me.”

“You fucked me up, Jean.” There’s none of the venom in Eren’s voice that has every right to be there, nothing but a soft, contemplative edge as he finishes his beer. He takes his time in looking back to me, and when he does, there’s only a ghost of the hurt I saw in his eyes months ago, something that still stings but has accepted the way things are. He’s just stating a fact, not accusing me. I almost wish he would. “Loving you fucked me up. And Michael was here to see the worst of the wreckage. Hell, he picked up most of the pieces. And maybe the fact that you fucked me up ain’t entirely your fault, maybe half of it’s on me, but Mick’s not gonna see it that way because Mick’s a little biased. I’m sure you have no idea what that’s like, overlooking someone’s faults because you love ‘em.”

He’s thought about this. All that time I spent wandering between empty houses and full suitcases, he’s been here, figuring out how to come to terms with his portion of the hell I’ve brought down on the remnants of my life. It would be easy for him to blame me, because it would be no more than what I deserve. God knows I’ve done enough blaming myself to have a detailed inventory of every single thing about this that’s my fault. But for Eren to take half that burden on his own shoulders, for him to say it so simply, like it’s reflex for him to carry my weight instead of letting me be crushed beneath it, that’s something I tell myself that I don’t understand even when it’s been clear all along.

It’s always been that way. I’ve only ever been as strong as the people who love me, and when it comes to standing on my own, I can only do it for so long before I fall.

Shaking my head, I look up at him and wonder how everything between us got so irreparably broken. We both know the answer to that question, but hearing it might tear me even further apart than I already am, so instead I ask him, “How is any of this on you?”

“Because I did it too. Hell, I still catch myself doing it sometimes, trying to forget that sometimes you can do shitty things to other people, just like anyone else can.” Even now, Eren looks like it hurts him to admit it, his shoulders hunching inward as he sinks down in his chair. There’s a moment after he falters, though, a split second where he looks back out towards the garage and something reminds him to straighten his spine, white knuckles around his empty bottle and pursed lips and furrowed brow betraying how hard he’s really working to remember his strength. “I’ve gotta stop pretending that you’re perfect, that you’re… fuck, I don’t know, some kinda _angel_ or something. That’s never been fair to you. You’re human; you’ve got as many faults and as much baggage and bullshit as anyone else. I should never have made myself think that you didn’t.”

I expected rage. I expected bitterness and well-deserved hatred. I expected Eren to drag me a mile over broken glass, a blow-by-blow of every time I could have been _better_ and wasn’t.

I didn’t expect absolution.

And maybe that wasn’t his point. It’s probably not normal, for me to find solace in someone I care about telling me that I do shitty things, but with every moment that the words echo in my head, the weight on my shoulders lessens. I’ve spent the better part of a year as a living legend, something that the world’s morphed into a grandiose concept of good or evil, misguided or calculating, right or wrong. I was never meant to be anything that big and complicated. My fragile bones can’t hold up beneath everything that people have projected on me, but I’ve kept running nonetheless, dragging Marco along with me and praying that someday we’ll have the time to stop and figure out just what we are, no headlines, no hearsay. Just us.

Eren sits there and tells me I am human, and the relief washes under my skin like the rain that Texas hasn’t seen in years. I am human.

I’d almost forgotten.

A tired smile stretches at lips that have long forgotten the motion, and I lean back in my chair, feeling like it’s all a little simpler now. “So you thought you loved me because you thought I was perfect.”

Eren growls something unintelligible and drags a hand down the side of his face, frustrated. “No, dumbass, I loved you because _I loved you_. But I could’ve saved myself a lot of sleepless nights by realizing that maybe I wasn’t the only one fucking things up. That blame’s on both of us, Jean.”

That’s the thing about being a walking contradiction. You never know where you stand. I want to say that if I’d known he felt that way, things would have been different, but lying to Eren won’t do either of us any good, not anymore. There are certain choices that you have to stand behind, anchors you have to cling to if you don’t want to get pulled out to sea. I don’t need to lie to him, because he already knows the truth of it, perhaps better than I do. I would have still chosen Marco, made every decision that lead me right here, drinking in a messy office and feeling like I should pour one out for the _something_ that Eren and I lost along the way. I wouldn’t change anything, other than perhaps having the decency to have some contrition about it from the very start. What happened there is the same thing that always happened before, that invisible support in the background lifting the burden from me while he still could. And I never even knew it.

I hadn’t realized that all the blame I _didn’t_ feel in the beginning ended up with Eren.

He can’t do that anymore. Eren can’t be the one who carries my struggles too close to his heart for little thanks and no reward. I won’t let him – and if Michael Bodt is any kind of man, neither will he.

“So, he wants to help,” I mutter, looking back at the door.

Eren nods, tired and heartsore, but earnest. “He wants to stop this shitshow before it gets any worse, yeah.”

“It can’t get much worse than this. He’s got his work cut out for him.”

For a moment, Eren stays quiet, chewing on his bottom lip like he’s not sure he should tell me what he’s thinking. It’s a visible process, how he takes an observation with the power to destroy me and dulls it down, makes it diplomatic in the way he never would for anyone else. “Marco’s changed.”

It still hurts. _God,_ it still hurts, because it’s two words that sum up every second of the last five months, one gut-wrenching truth that I’ll never be able to run far enough to escape. Marco’s changed. The Marco I fell in love with was warm and bright, quick to laughter, a child in a man’s body with big dreams and bigger possibilities, forever playing at a game of cops and robbers that got out of his hands somehow. The Marco I still love so much that it aches, the Marco I helped make, he’s cold and distant, stuck somewhere in his own head that I can’t reach. I’ve spent five months trying to get in, playing out endless whispered apologies in the shape of exactly sixty-two scars, but it never works. It’s the cruelest sort of pain, knowing that you’ve lost someone even when they’re lying right there in your arms.

“I’ve tried,” I choke, hands shaking in my lap. The only strength I’ve got left is fighting back the tears, letting them sit heavy and thick on my faltering voice because that’s marginally better than breaking down sobbing into Eren’s shoulder for the millionth time. “God Almighty, Eren, I’ve _tried._ I’ve tried to give him space and I’ve tried to stop beating myself up but I see what’s happened to him and I _can’t_ …”

“What happened wasn’t your fault,” he whispers, still up to his old ways despite all his talk, still trying to absolve me of things we both know are unforgivable. “He loves you enough to not blame you for any of it.”

“I don’t even know if Marco loves me anymore. I know I wouldn’t.” It _hurts._ It hurts so badly that all I can do is laugh, a hideous, crackling noise that bounces off the walls of the office and rebounds on me, surrounding me with the sound of my own loss. “And I think… I think Michael’s right, y’know? I’m a terrible person. I’m selfish and I’m blind and I do _awful_ shit to people who love me. And there’s no way out. That’s why Marco’s still with me. We’re in too deep and there’s no way out…”

“So let us help you.”

I sniff and shake my head, swiping dirty sleeves across my cheeks. “You’ve helped me a hell of a lot more than I had any right to ask for.”

“One last time, then, yeah?” When I look up at Eren, his eyes are too-bright and swimming. He still feels my pain for me even when I don’t want him to. “For old times’ sake.”

I came here to ask for one last miracle, for the keys to my old truck and the torture of small-talk with someone who used to love me before I fucked off and got out of his life forever. He would have been better off. But Eren has other plans, as Eren often does, clinging stubbornly to the sinking shipwreck of me and trying to at least get me a little closer to shore before I go down. And as for the disaster going on over in the garage, I can’t speak for that, but it’s been a long time since I’ve had any options. I might not put any stock in Michael Bodt, but I believe in Eren, and that’ll have to be enough.

“And you’re sure we can trust him,” I sigh, rubbing at the headache raging behind my temples.

Eren nods. “I’m positive.”

“Why?”

“He loves me.”

I said that, once. It’s a lifetime ago at least, that night in the dusty darkness of my backyard, me shouting _He loves me_ like it was a magic bandage that could fix everything and Eren shattering that illusion with _SO DO I._ We’re different people now than we were back then, but the power in those words remains the same. Even if it doesn’t fix anything, it gives you a place to start picking up the pieces.

I said it once, and then I walked away in silence. It’s been a long time coming, but I’m finally starting to learn from my mistakes.

“What do you want me to say?” I ask him.

Eren shrugs. “Nothing. I just want you to know that I get it now.”

I’m a wanted man running from a world that’s got a price on my head, but someone understands me. Against all logic, I breathe a little easier.

But that respite only lasts a few seconds, a stretch of quiet broken by the door creaking on its hinges and Michael Bodt barging in uninvited with Marco hot on his heels, both of them looking like they’re on the tail end of a rather impressive fistfight. Marco’s sporting a bruised jaw, but other than that, he looks like he won. A childish sort of pride hums in my chest.

Michael wipes a red smear from his lips across the back of his hand and grumbles, “All right, family reunion’s over. Let’s talk business.”

Eren looks nervously between the two of them, but there’s none of the tension that should be present in two people who just beat the shit out of each other. My only experience is with a little sister, and Eren’s only experience is with Mikasa, but the trope about brothers getting in stupid fights and moving on seems to have a grain of truth to it. If anything, Marco and Michael seem more relaxed around each other than they did before. Marco sits down on top of the desk and raises an eyebrow at the mess of scattered papers, looking over at his brother. Michael smirks.

“Are you two gonna be civil?” Eren huffs, and he’s not warning the two Bodts, a cautionary glare darting from me to Michael and back to me.

“Depends on how certain people conduct themselves,” Michael snaps, all of his swagger flying out the window as he abandons it in favor of looking at me like I’m an unpleasant pile of pond scum.

My gut reaction is to lash back, but Eren’s death stare hits me before I even open my mouth, and I don’t want to play the odds of Marco wanting to stay out of it and leaving me in a two-on-one argument. There are bigger things at stake than my wounded pride, so I cross my arms and mutter, “I’ll play nice if you will.”

Michael gives Eren a mutinous look, but doesn’t instigate anything, hands twitching at the hem of his rumpled suit jacket until Eren reaches up and tangles their fingers together like it’s second nature. Marco looks vaguely ill. Rolling his eyes, Eren lets go of Michael’s hand and says, “All right, now that we’ve got the two of you in one place and no one’s tryin’ to clean anyone’s clock, it’s time to discuss how we’re gonna put a stop to all of this.”

“Who says we’re gonna stop?” Marco scoffs, affronted at the very thought. He just got back in action after five months on the sidelines. Telling him to stop might as well be telling a dust storm to settle. Anyone with the gall to try and tame him will only end up kicking him into more of a frenzy. I wish I could be as exasperated with it as I know I should be, but there’s so much of the old him in that determination that I’d rather cling to it than try to dispel it.

I miss him. The seasons have changed and so have we and I _miss him,_ so much that it’s become a constant pain in the marrow of my bones. Maybe the days of my beautiful madman and his Cheshire Cat smile are long gone, but I’ll be content to stay and wait for his ghost to come calling, sparking in short bursts through the wreckage of whatever’s left of him.

I wonder if he misses me. There was never much to begin with, but maybe there was enough there to give Marco something to remember when he looks at me now. I’ve become less than myself, too. I don’t need Eren’s pity or Michael’s hatred to tell me that.

What an odd time to realize that I don’t remember the last time I touched my trumpet.

“Did that glass shard carve out a chunk of your brain, too?” Michael hisses, rounding on his brother with a disbelieving shake of his head. “You’re already down an eye, Marco. What d’you think’s gonna happen if y’all keep this up?”

“We don’t have any other options!”

“You say that ‘cause you don’t _want_ to have any other options!” The room goes dead quiet. Marco doesn’t bother denying it, and that’s as good as an admission, something that could almost be guilt in the slump of his shoulders as Michael jams a bony finger into his chest. “I’ll tell you what your _only_ option is. You get enough money to take care of yourselves, and you jump the border and live out the rest of your lives on some beach in Mexico, nice and quiet. You’re driving down a road with a couple of six-foot holes at the end, little brother. This is the last detour you’ve got.”

He’s not wrong. That’s the worst thing about all of this. Michael Bodt and his stupid face and slimy mannerisms, he’s hitting the nail right on the head, driving home something we’ve both been running away from for the past year. There was never a good way out, something we ignored in our delusions of grandeur and the rush of what we thought was freedom in our veins. Our plans have only ever been diversions, with no endgame other than some abstract fate in the distance – New York, infamy, anonymity, none of it mattered as long as it involved _us._

We never talked about death, though. Every time one of us tried, the other would shut it down, because reality has a bad habit of breaking spells and taking away the ability to pretend that everything will be all right. We never talked about it, even after Marco almost bled out in my arms, after he almost slipped into a fever dream and never came out, after I drove through a rain of bullets and brought the four of us out unscathed by some twist of divine humor. If we didn’t talk about it, it wasn’t real.

Michael Bodt just made it real. As if I didn’t have a reason to hate him before.

It’s too late to shrug off that reality, and I have a feeling that if I tried, Eren wouldn’t let me. I face it instead, try to be brave and almost succeed, only the slightest waver in my voice when I ask, “What about my family?”

“You get enough money to leave them some too, then. A few more months, a few more jobs.” Michael actually looks surprised that I’ve broached the subject of Mom and Nettie. I bite back a scathing rebuke about how despite what the newspapers might say, I’m not an angel, but I’m not Lucifer himself either, about how I’m not completely devoid of loyalty and love. I don’t even have to say it, because he heads me off at the pass, dredging up my old shortcomings with ruthless relevancy. “You can’t rely on Eren to stick his neck out for you anymore. No more runs into Dallas, no more dropping stolen cash in the mail. Whatever y’all decide to do in the end, you’re not dragging him down with you.”

I _know_ that I’ve done wrong by Eren. I know it, I’ve admitted it, and everyone here is aware of it. But admitting that I’ve done wrong by him isn’t the same as admitting that I’ve put him in danger. More than once. My stomach churns, and I lean forward in my seat, the only thing pulling me back from the edge of a breakdown the steady warmth of Marco’s hand squeezing my shoulder. Shuddering, I sit back up, trying to muddle through the mess of self-loathing and fear in my head to find something useful to say. “Then how am I supposed to get money to my folks?”

I’m only good for questions now. I haven’t been good for answers in a long time, if ever.

“You keep in touch,” Michael says, shrugging. “I travel a lot anyways; it’s not hard for me to meet you out on the road somewhere and bring the money back here. I don’t know how much Marco’s told you, but I’m sorta in the business of shady business. I’ve got enough know-how to launder the cash through the garage. By the time it makes it to your mother and sister, it’ll be squeaky clean. They’ll be untouchable.”

“If they find out that stolen money’s runnin’ through the garage—“

“I’m good at what I do. They won’t find out.” There’s a difference in the peacock boasting and attitude that he seems to put off as a default and his conviction now, a confidence that speaks not only of experience but necessity. He won’t fall through because he _can’t._ I stop my train of thought right there because I don’t want to do something awful, like start respecting him. “Anyhow, I’m the one that does all the paperwork nowadays. It’d come down on me, not Eren.”

I squint and tilt my head at him, trying to add up numbers that don’t fit. “Why would you do that for me?”

“Not for you.” With a sharp exhalation and a curl of his lip, Michael leans against the doorframe and gives me a look that’s a little closer to empathy than utter disdain. “Just because you’re an idiot don’t mean your family should suffer for it.”

I have to try a couple of times to force myself to say it, but I eventually get out a bitter, garbled, “Thank you.”

“Shut up,” he snorts. “I already said I’m not doin’ it for you.”

“Mick,” says Eren, but it’s not a warning this time. It’s more the tone he used when he told me that I was allowed to make human mistakes. Maybe I’m not the only one here who has a broken family to answer for.

Michael checks his watch and curses under his breath. “We need to get all of you outta here, and quick. You got somewhere you can go?”

“Back to foreclosed houses, I guess,” I reply, “But I—“

“Good enough.”

“You’re the one griping about how you ain’t seen me in five years, and you’re shoving me out the door?” Marco cuts in, hopping up off the desk. “Can we not stay and catch our breaths for a minute? We’re off the map.”

“We can catch up after you call in and tell me that you got a haul for me to pick up.” For someone trying to placate Marco, Michael’s sure looking at me a lot, a nervous twist to his frown as he drums his fingers against his leg. “Drinks on me. But for now, you really should go.”

“What d’you not want me to see?” I ask, incredulous.

“It’s more along the lines of who I don’t want to see you—“ he starts, cut off by the bell on the lobby door jingling. “Fuck.”

“Hey, Mick, I got the top grade in my class on that essay you helped me with—“

Ninette stops in the doorway, eyes wide and the end of her sentence dying on her lips.

She looks different; hair falling loose down her back instead of braided, dress pressed and clean without a stain or tear in sight. New clothes. Her features are still angular, her limbs still gangly and coltish, but she doesn’t look _hungry_ now, her cheeks flushed from running into the shop and a little more filled out than they were the last time I saw her. She looks healthy. But she looks so, so far from happy, standing there and watching me like she can’t decide if I’m a dream or a nightmare.

“Nettie.” She’s very stiff when I race across the room and pull her into a tight hug, arms straight down at her sides. I don’t even have to crouch that much to be at her eye level. She’s ten years old. She turned ten, and I missed it. “God, you’ve gotten tall.”

She blinks. “Yeah, I guess.”

“And you’re back in school?”

“Nothin’ better to do.”

Frowning, I brush back the locks of hair hanging in her face, wondering why she won’t look at me. “Are you okay? What are you doing here, kiddo?”

“I come by the garage after school, stay until Eren closes up,” she shrugs, scuffing a Mary Jane-clad foot across the worn floorboards.

“Why not just walk home?”

“’Cause I don’t wanna go home.”

“She tried to run away and ended up on my porch in the middle of the night three times before I offered her a compromise,” says Eren, wringing his hands. “I didn’t want you to find out like this, Jean, but your mother… she’s not all there anymore. She’s in no shape to be takin’ care of a kid, and it’s not like I have business worth a shit, so I let Nettie hang around after school.”

It all comes together with a sinking understanding, my heart dropping to my shoes. Nettie’s put together and shined-up like a new penny in her expensive dress and patent leather shoes, but it’s not a dress and shoes that Mom would buy, smart and tasteful but with a distinct lack of frills and a palette of muted green fabric instead of the brightest shade of pink money can get. Someone’s been shopping for her, making sure she’s got clothes to grow into, taking care of her, but not the person that’s supposed to be.

I came to terms with what happened between my mother and I a few months ago. If she wanted to be disgusted by me, fine. If she wanted to never acknowledge my existence save for taking money from me, fine. I told myself that with enough time to heal, I could be fine with all of that, under one condition. That one condition was that she take care of Ninette. All I wanted her to do was give the love and care to my sister that she could no longer give to me, and she couldn’t even manage that much, lost in the heartbreak her baby boy brought home in a newspaper headline.

Even with how good I am at blaming myself, I can’t make this completely my fault. I’ve spent years hating my father for being a shitty parent. The fact that I have to transfer that disappointment and anger to one of the people I was once content to live a lie to please just… stings. I can’t be as mad at myself as I’d like to be, but I can be _horrified,_ looking over at Ninette and wondering who’s been cooking her meals and buying her dresses she doesn’t look miserable in.

“I learned how to change a transmission,” she says, voice flat around something that would have made her ecstatic once.

I swallow hard, but the lump in my throat isn’t going anywhere. “Did you?”

“Yeah. And Mick’s real smart and knows all kinds of things. He’s teaching me how to count cards so I can be a card shark someday.”

Glaring up at Michael over her shoulder, I force a laugh and ask her, “Is he, now. What happened to playing major league baseball?”

“They don’t let girls in the major leagues. Mick says I can be a femme fay-tale.”

“Don’t let Mom hear you say that.”

“Ma don’t hear much these days,” Nettie mumbles, shaking her head. “Not unless it’s ‘Jean’s in the paper again,’ or ‘bottle’s empty.’ Those two usually happen pretty close together.”

“Oh, Nettie.” There’s nothing I can say to her to justify it, no promise that it’ll get better that wouldn’t be a lie. Hell, I have to fight just to function through the thought of the hideous could-be’s that she’s been going home to for months, the horror of what happened to Marco in a broken home mixed with the knowledge that people always want _someone_ to take the blame even if it’s not their burden to carry. “Listen, if she ever… if she…”

“She doesn’t hit me or nothin’,” she shrugs, frowning down at her feet. “Most of the time it’s just like she’s… gone.”

I wanted to give her a life and a family she could be happy with. Instead, I all but orphaned her. What is it about me, that people like Ninette and Eren and Marco have to bear the consequences of my failings and I don’t? They’ve all got scars while my skin is hatefully clear, a bleeding heart and a broken soul not enough of a wound to compare to them crawling across the broken glass I leave strewn behind me like a trail to ruin. I grab one of her little hands in both of mine and wonder if I’ll ever get it right enough to stop _hurting_ people so much. “God, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Ninette doesn’t forgive me, and I don’t expect her to. Instead, she looks right past me, coolly surveying Marco across the room. “Guess you’re not dead, then.”

“Don’t reckon I am, Miss Ninette,” he says, giving her the same polite little nod and tip of his hat that he always used to. If it weren’t for Marco’s scars and eyepatch and Nettie’s jaded stare, it could be a year ago, the three of us listening to the Lone Ranger on our old radio and patching up her sandlot battle wounds. But times have changed, and so have we. Everyone here is less than they once were, and no one even knows who to blame anymore.

(It’s easier to blame yourself than dig for the truth in something this convoluted. Oh God, Nettie, sweetheart, please don’t take the easy road.)

“I’ve still got it,” she says.

Marco frowns a little. “Beg pardon?”

With a dull thud, Ninette swings her school bag off her shoulder, yanking it open and rifling through the mess of snapped pencils and dog-eared books until she finds what she’s looking for. She lays the ratty old newsboy cap in front of Marco like a poker player laying out his winning hand, nodding down at the threadbare promise they made when they were both different people. “Your collateral. I’ve still got it. You still gotta keep him safe.”

Marco nods and picks the cap up, something soft in his smile that I haven’t seen in a long time as he places it on her head. “That’s the plan, little darlin’.”

Michael steps forward from his spot in the doorway, placing a hand on Ninette’s shoulder to guide her back out into the lobby. “Nettie, they’ve gotta get on the road…”

“Can I have a minute with my sister, please?” I snap, and miracle of miracles, he backs off. Eren gets up and nods towards the garage, and all three of them retreat, leaving Nettie and I alone in the stuffy heat of the office. I want to reach out to her but know that she won’t find any comfort in trembling hands, so instead I hook my thumbs in my pockets and kneel down again, trying to get her to look me in the eye. “Ninette, listen—“

“I know you can’t come home,” she whispers, cutting me off. “I’m not stupid.”

“I wish I could, kiddo,” I tell her, my voice cracking. She’s never seen me cry before. I always figured she’d be frightened if she did, knowing that her big brother didn’t have everything under control. But she’s known that for a while now, I suppose, and she just watches me blubber through my mea culpas with a detached sort of interest. “I wish I could be with you and Mom. I wish things had worked out and we were all livin’ in a big penthouse in New York right now. I wish you didn’t have to go through this alone.”

“I’m not alone,” she says, shrugging again. It’s a simple observation. Not hopeful, but not lost, either. It’s the best I could hope for, given the situation.

I squeeze her shoulder, trying to blink the stinging heat from my eyes. “Eren’s always gonna be there for you, you know that, right? Even if I can’t be.”

“I know.” Nettie still won’t look at me, but she looks at the closed door, her lips pressed into a thin line. “You shouldn’t be so mean to Michael. He’s the one that talked me into goin’ back to school. He said it was what you’d want.”

“I shouldn’t have done a lotta things,” I sigh, heartsick and yearning for the days when I was the one teaching her life lessons instead of the other way around. “But I guess it’s too late for me to fix it.”

Neither of us says anything for a long time. Slowly, cautiously, Nettie brings her eyes up to meet mine, and the hurt I see in them shreds what’s left of my heart into a bloody pulp. “I just wanna know why.”

There’s a lot of _whys_ I can’t even begin to answer, kiddo. “Why what?”

“Why you left. Why you can’t come home.”

“It’s… It’s hard to explain, Nettie.” How do I put it in words, years of feeling like I was suffocating, an existence where she was the only bright spot until Marco came along and lit my whole damn world on fire, the first gasp of free air that got in my lungs and wouldn’t leave and swallowed up all my settle-down until I was a wayward spirit called by the siren song of the open road? How do I tell her that I loved her too much to leave but that I loved Marco too much to stay? How can anyone explain that self-fought war to a ten year old that should be worried about baseball and playground tussles instead of the ways the world can tear you into pieces? You can’t. But dammit, I try. “Maybe someday, you’ll love someone. Maybe someday you’ll love someone so much that you’d do anything to stay with them, anything to keep them safe and with you.”

“You mean like how…” _You mean like how you love Marco._ Nettie’s always been a smart kid, and no matter what Mom did or didn’t tell her, she probably always saw what was there, even if it was unspoken. She understands, and even if she can’t forgive, it’s a start to her maybe being okay someday.

I nod, running my fingers along the brim of the newsboy cap setting crooked on her head. “Yeah, like—“

“You mean like how Michael loves Eren.”

Nettie’s always been a smart kid. Even as young as she is, still clinging to whatever innocence life hasn’t stolen from her, she still knows that a love like mine is one that consumes you, eats you from the inside out until there’s nothing left. I’d never want that for her. I’d walk straight into hell itself if I could do so holding Marco’s hand, but choosing a damned path for myself and wishing something like it on my baby sister are two very different things.

All of my bitterness and self-blame aside, I want her to know love. I want her to know a love that’s sacrifice without giving all of you away, a love that’s willing to hold out helping hands to enemies because sometimes being selfless means more than being proud. I want her to know a love that mends broken things instead of scattering them wherever it goes. I want my sister to know a love that never leaves her bearing – or worse, counting – scars.

I can’t show her that. But there’s someone who can.

“I brought your truck into the garage,” Eren says, poking his head in the door and dangling a key ring from the tip of his finger. “No car chases, y’hear? That piece of junk won’t survive one.”

“Thanks, Eren,” I whisper before turning back to Nettie, bringing both hands up to rest on her shoulders. “Hey. Ninette, look at me.”

She does. And while the hurt in her eyes is still present, there’s also understanding. Maybe not forgiveness, but I’d never expect that from her anyway. Not when I’m so far from deserving it. “Stay in school, mind Eren, and—“

“And no fightin’. I know.”

“I love you. I love you so much. Always remember that.”

She hesitates for a moment, and then something in her little body caves, curving inward and throwing her arms around my neck so I don’t have to see the tears behind “I love you too.”

It’s not forgiveness. But it’s something to hold onto.

Michael and Eren send Nettie up the road before we pack up and haul out, the sun setting on Dallas as Connie and Sasha climb up into the rusted bed of my truck. The engine echoes and rattles in the empty garage, and Michael has to shout to make himself heard, leaning in the open passenger side window and passing a sealed envelope to Marco. “I’d head North. As far North as you can go. Lotta empty farmland up there, lots of places to lay low and people who won’t ask questions. I’ve got a contact in Iowa that runs a motel to front some… less reputable business. The address is in that envelope. I’ll call ahead and make arrangements. If you keep your mouths shut, he’ll return the favor. It’s not much, but it’s somewhere to start.”

“It’s more than we’ve had in five months,” Marco hums, staring down at the envelope. “Thanks, Mick.”

“And Marco.”

“Yeah?”

Michael pauses for a moment, debating with himself before he finally sighs, “Be careful. I sat through your funeral once. I don’t wanna do it again.”

Marco breaks into something that almost resembles his old Cheshire grin, the line of his eyepatch indenting his cheek as he leans back in his seat. “Since when has either of us been careful?”

“Point taken,” Michael nods, sticking an arm into the cab of the truck through the window. “Stay outta trouble if you can…”

“Stay outta jail if you can’t,” Marco laughs, grabbing his brother’s hand and giving it a tight squeeze before Michael steps back to help Eren haul up the garage door. “I’ll be in touch.”

“You’d better be, you little shit.”

They both wave as we drive off down the darkened street, out into the countryside, and away from Dallas, striking out a northward path. More than a year ago, I picked Marco Bodt up off the side of the road, and he sat in the same seat he’s sitting in now, and he smiled a smile like the edge of a knife and said, _You know what, Jean Kirschtein, I like you._ More than a year ago, and it feels like it might have happened in a different world entirely.

Times have changed, and so have we.

Something in me knew that I was going to change the day I met Marco, but I’d always hoped that it would be a change for the _better._ I wanted to be so much stronger than I am right now, wanted to run off towards my great perhaps with no regrets, wanted to be a better brother, a better son, wanted to stand up a little straighter and walk a little steadier under the yoke of my own burdens.

Marco told me as the tide came in around our ankles in Louisiana that there is no change for the better or worse. There’s just change. He told me that if it ever got to be too much, I should focus on the things in life that will always be the same.

I’ve changed so much that there’s not a place for me in Dallas anymore. Eren’s life, Nettie’s life, I don’t fit into them the way I used to. And if I tried, it’d only hurt them. But they’re okay. They’re okay. It should destroy me, thinking that the people I hold dearest can get along just fine without me, but I can’t help but find a measure of peace in it. It’s good to know that even if I’m not, even if I’ll never be again, they’re okay.

I’ve changed, and they’ve changed, and Marco’s changed, but there’s one thing that’s still the same, ever since that first time he sat in the seat he’s sitting in now, smiling at me like he had a whole world of secrets tucked into his pocket.

He still makes me weak in the best of ways, reaching out and grabbing my hand as the dust kicks up in the yellow arc of the headlights. “How ‘bout it, darlin’? One last run.”

And I love him. Past, present, future, I love him.

Times have changed, and so have we, but that never will.

“Yeah,” I whisper, finding comfort in the weight of his hand in mine. “One last run.”


	25. Marco

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Behold, sixteen thousand worsd of concentrated hot mess.
> 
> Warnings for this chapter include vague mentions of past child abuse, vague mentions of past trauma, and general emotional atom bombs going off.
> 
> This chapter's listening homework consists of:  
> [Sarah Smiles](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nV97_YorkbU) by Panic! At the Disco - Mick's backstory  
> [King](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WmSPTkmBTA) by Lauren Aquilina - Marco to Jean in that sickly fluffy JM moment about halfway through  
> [Doubt](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEiVnNNpJLA) by twenty one pilots - for that part when shit hits the fan  
> [Bird Song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPhGybu1T8o) by Florence + the Machine - that scene at the end of the chapter
> 
> I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.
> 
> I have a [tumblr.](http://southspinner.tumblr.com)

When I was sixteen years old, I spent a lot of time on trains.

The road between Telico and Houston was anything but a straight shot, a winding maze of railroad tracks that took me up to Kansas City and down to El Paso and around in a dizzying spiral, a months-long fever dream of shifting landscapes and healing wounds that ended with me sitting in the dirt at the Houston train station after a conductor found me huddling behind a stack of boxes and booted me off before the wheels even stopped turning.

There’s a limited amount of things to entertain yourself when you travel like that. Most of the other people riding the rails at the time drank, or played cards, or slept. I read.

The funny thing was, I’d never been much of one for books before that, unless you count Mick and I stealing them from our brother Martin and hiding them in the hayloft just to see how much of a fit he’d throw. But with fresh scars that screamed in pain if I moved too much and hours surrounded by other folks’ suitcases, my options were limited. So I scavenged for whatever I could find, textbooks, classic novels, penny dreadfuls picked up from the shelves of five-and-dimes.

I read so many stories that I began to see a pattern in all of them, something that real life can never really mirror. All those little worlds tied up in pretty or not-so-pretty boxes, beginning-middle-end, rising action, climax, falling action and resolutions. There’s nothing like that in the real world. The best we humans get is things falling into a vicious circle, the kind that takes the past and twists it and leaves you riding the same rails at twenty-one that you did at sixteen, with far more scars and far less hope.

Michael’s instructions were clear – _Go north, and leave a trail. Make ‘em see you, but make sure you’re always two steps ahead._ Easier said than done, with a whole legion of lawmen on our tails and our faces plastered all over every newspaper. As the next months pass, our system has to evolve into something less efficient, more time and failsafes, taking one step forward and three back.

We never keep the same car for two jobs, ditching our getaway vehicle as soon as we can and navigating our way cross-country by hopping freight trains at rural stations. It’s a touch and go situation at best, involving a lot of doubling back on our own trail and having to start over from miles behind. We spend our nights in train cars and the occasional foreclosed house, sleeping in shifts to keep a lookout so another Joplin doesn’t happen. The cash piles up, the awed looks of recognition in every place we hold up don’t stop, and we move north, albeit at a snail’s pace. The others have their ways of keeping themselves busy in the in-between. Connie whittles bits of scrap wood with the same knife he used to carve out my eye. Sasha prays. Jean sits and stares at nothing for hours.

I take up reading again. Why the hell not? I used to be cynical about all those neatly packaged narratives, but sitting in the eye of our own personal hurricane, they start to feel almost like comfort. I read volumes of poetry borrowed from suitcases and waterlogged paperbacks smuggled from trash piles, biographies and fairytales, sometimes whispering the lines aloud until they lull Jean into a fitful sleep on my shoulder. And we ride. And we stop. And we steal a car. And we do a job. And we run. And we ride.

And finally, with the week after Christmas wrapping around us with a grip far colder than we were prepared for, we make it to Iowa. For a promised land, it’s kind of a shithole.

Michael’s assured refuge and reliable contact end up being a seedy motel and a skinny guy with slicked-back hair and a thick German accent who constantly looks back and forth with his beady little eyes, like he’s waiting for something to jump out at him. But I slip him the envelope my brother gave me back in Dallas, and he hands me a key and doesn’t ask questions, and that’s about as easy as it gets anymore. We settle in for the next few days, I call Mick like I’m supposed to, and it feels enough like getting out of a rut to feed a tiny spark of optimism.

Four days after we arrive, that optimism dies as I’m sitting on the edge of the bed one frigid morning, counting out our cash. “It’s not enough.”

“What’s not enough?” Jean asks, walking out of the bathroom with his hair damp and his shirt half-buttoned.

“Money,” I frown, nodding down at the stacked piles of bills. “We’ve got a few thousand saved up, but it’s not near what we’re gonna need. We need to give your folks enough to get by, and then still have some to get us over the border and pay to keep people quiet. If Annie ever taught me anything, it’s that silence don’t come cheap.”

He shrugs and grabs one of the chairs from the kitchenette, walking past where Sasha’s mending one of Connie’s shirts at the table to grab a bottle of beer and come sit down beside me. “So we do more jobs.”

“Every job we do’s just another opportunity for us to fuck up, Jean.”

“Every job we do is _necessary._ ” There’s no talking to him when he’s like this. One of the reasons I fell in love with Jean to begin with was how damned stubborn he can be, but it makes things difficult when he puts his head down and plows straight through the realm of common sense in the name of getting what he wants. He’s taken that light at the end of the tunnel and let it blind him, kicking his legs up into my lap and grinning at me. “And besides, we’re in the best possible situation right now. I can say a lot about Michael, but he’s not an idiot. Sending us north and telling us to leave a trail, that was a good plan. The feds think we’re headed for Canada when we’re really gonna go back south. They’ll be so scrambled tryin’ to find us that we don’t need to worry about an ambush happening again.”

“Smith and Ackerman ain’t the only enemies we got,” I point out. “Ever since Joplin, the whole damn country’s out for our blood.”

“We signed autographs in Omaha two weeks ago. You call that ‘out for our blood?’”

Groaning, I squeeze my eye shut until the darkness behind my eyelid flashes white and try to hold onto whatever small amount of tact I have left. “We can’t get lazy. The second we do that, everything goes to shit.”

“I’m not sayin’ we get lazy. I’m sayin’ we do what we have to do.” Despite the radiator doing valiant, rattling battle against the winter chill outside, it’s still cold in the room, but Jean’s hand is warm where it brushes my cheek, his lips like sunshine where they press against mine. “It’s just a few more jobs, baby. A few more jobs, one more stop in Dallas to say goodbye to Nettie, and then we’re home free, just you and me. Nothin’ but sunny days and the ocean.”

“And hurricanes and tap water that gives you the screamin’ shits.”

Jean throws back his head and laughs, and hearing it makes my chest hurt. It’s been too long since he laughed like that, too long since he smiled without any sadness behind it, and the fact that I have to be the one who takes that from him just as he’s starting to get it back is more cruel than most of the things we’ve had to deal with. “I’ve never known anyone that lived in Mexico. What’ll we do in Mexico?”

“Hopefully get a nice little cottage on the beach and stay far away from the general public,” I snort, starting to count through the money again. Not enough, not enough…

“Yeah, but what’ll we _do_?” he presses on, interrupting my train of thought and making me lose count.

“Hell if I know, darlin’,” I snap, the few remaining frazzled nerves I have twanging under the tension like a bowstring one more pull from breaking. I shouldn’t be aiming all of this at him. I know I shouldn’t. “You’ve got your trumpet; join a damn mariachi band for all I care!”

Most of my talent has always been concentrated in doing things I shouldn’t.

Jean sits back in his chair and puts his feet back on the floor, severing the contact between us and leaving me feeling the cold far more acutely than I should. He doesn’t acknowledge the hurt, but I know him well enough to see it, settling behind his eyes and bowing his spine as his fingers dart up to fiddle with the ring hanging around his neck. I got him a new chain for it weeks ago. He still hasn’t taken it off the ragged length of twine that chafes his skin and reminds him what a mistake he made in loving me.

The part of me that doesn’t hate myself every time I see it nurses an irrational anger, yet another thing I shouldn’t put on Jean’s shoulders, the rage that I don’t really have a choice in bearing my consequences. I can’t take off my scars when they get too heavy.

“Marco Bodt!” Sasha chides, her head snapping up from her work with an eerie sharpness. She trains a glare on me that could probably send most grown men running for their lives, but I don’t care enough for my own anymore to bother with it. “We have put up with your sulking and your moping for months now, but you can check your attitude at the door! Shame on you, talkin’ to someone who loves you that way.”

“It’s fine, Sasha,” Jean whispers, looking at the floor.

“No, it ain’t! After all we’ve been through, the least we all could do is be a little nicer to each other, which seems to be a lesson that _this one_ ,” she hisses, pointing her needle at me, “never learned – and where do you think you’re going?”

I’m up and across the room before she can really wind up for a lecture, my hand hovering over the doorknob. The room that was a safe haven days ago feels like a crypt now, stifling and hopeless. I can only handle so much. Jean watches me from the bed, a hand half extended towards me in place of a request he won’t make. I heard once that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Jean and I must both be crazy for holding on to a hope that maybe one day the stars will align and we’ll live in a world where we can both stop trying so hard to be alone with our burdens.

Today isn’t that day. I might not be able to stop Jean from blaming himself, but I can go somewhere I don’t have to see it destroy him for a few minutes.

“Outside,” I mutter. “Where it’s quiet.”

“Well, don’t come lookin’ for sympathy when you catch pneumonia,” Sasha sniffs, going back to sewing up a garment that’s more patches than shirt by this point.

“I know better than to come lookin’ for sympathy from you, Sasha. When I’m lookin’ for an earful of bullshit, though, I know who to call.”

“Why you little—“

The door shuts behind me before she has the chance to finish. Outside, there's no buffer against the cold, a merciless wind cutting through clothes and skin all the way down to my bones. From the edge of the porch outwards, everything is a swirling mass of white. The snow started the night we arrived in Iowa, and it's only gotten worse since, piling up on rooftops and roads until everything surrounding the motel looks like blurred shadows. The locals don't seem to let it bother them, though, bustling in and out of the dinner across the street wrapped in the heavy coats that we were too stupid to buy, driving down the icy streets with gray slush blooming outwards from their tires.

One of them pulls into the motel’s lot, a black Packard that fishtails a little in the unshoveled mess of snow before it screeches to a stop in front of our room and Connie hops out of the passenger side, cursing and wrapping his thin jacket as tightly around himself as he can. Must have gone out earlier to steal us a new set of wheels. He makes it almost to the door before he notices me standing there, giving me a dumbfounded look for standing out in the cold in nothing but a threadbare shirt and slacks. “Colder than a witch’s tit, ain’t it?”

“I don’t mind it. S’better than Texas,” I shrug, digging through my pocket for my last cigarette. “I’ve never seen snow ‘til now.”

“Yeah, I s’pose it’s real pretty until it makes you get sick or crash your car,” says Connie. His teeth are chattering, but he stands beside me and reaches for a smoke too, something hesitant in the way he looks at the door. He knows something happened. I've said it before, and I'll say it again – Connie Springer might be an idiot, but he's an oddly perceptive one. He raises an eyebrow at me and nods toward the motel, where the muted sound of Sasha's voice isn't quite intelligible over the mournful howl of the blizzard.

“Pneumonia’s better than sittin’ in there listening to Jean plan out fleeing over the border like it’s a damned vacation,” I scoff, lighting up. The smoke doesn't warm my lungs. If anything, it just makes every breath feel sharper, biting at my throat and burning all the way down.

Connie frowns, squinting out at the wall of white obscuring the horizon. “Jean’s just tryin’ to lighten the mood. You can’t fault him for tryin’ to help us forget how shitty everything is.”

No, I can't. I can't fault him for trying to find brightness in a situation that's been so dark for so long. If anything, I should be happy to see him smile again. There are moments when he talks about adventure and new places and new people where he seems almost like _my Jean_ again, the bright-eyed boy I met who carried his dreams close instead of the broken man I know now who watched them die. I would kill to see him as happy as he was when we first got out on the road. I'd do anything to bring those days back, waking up to him smiling in his sleep, watching the way he'd light up the stages in dingy jazz bars. I'd make any sacrifice to bring that Jean back.

But the problem is that I no longer have anything left of me to offer. Maybe that's why I'm so bitter. I see the hope that Jean has of getting better, and I know that there's none for me. My nightmares are too long-suffered and that empty place that's been there at the center of me since that awful day in Dallas has grown too much. I don't even remember who the old me was. How am I supposed to bring him back?

Now that I think about it, Jean's smile died along with the best of me. Maybe now that he's had time to mourn the part of me that he loved, he's finally starting to heal.

The wind howls, and the cold cuts deeper, and I whisper, “I haven’t been able to forget how shitty everything is for a long time.”

Connie’s quiet for a while, pursing his lips, weighing the consequences of saying what's on his mind before he lets it out. “You know that he’s gonna find out what happened on the train after Joplin eventually, right?”

And it's only a testament to what I've become, the fact that I haven't thought about Joplin for ages now. The man I killed weighs more heavily on Connie’s conscience than he does on my own. That should horrify me, or at least make me feel _something_ , anything other than the steady beat of my own heart and the sting of the snow against my skin.

I wonder if that makes it any better, that I'm fully aware of what a monster I've turned into.

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” I hum, letting the cigarette burn out between my fingers before I flick it over the railing.

“I know you, brother. You’ll jump off that bridge before you ever cross it.”

“There ain’t no point, Connie.” It comes out sharper than I mean it to, but Connie’s skin is thick after a lifetime of putting up with my shit. He just shakes his head and goes back to watching the snow, only half-interested in whatever justification I can dream up for myself this time. “Jean’s enough of a mess without me makin’ it worse.”

“God, that’s fuckin’ sad,” he says.

“What is?”

“How you two destroy yourselves tryin’ to protect each other.”

I've destroyed myself for several things, to spite my parents, to prove something to everyone and myself, to make a mark on a world that never wanted me. I've never really considered the fact that I might be setting myself on fire to keep Jean warm, even as I watched him do the same for me. At the end of everything, maybe we'll both be intermingled ashes, wasted and lost, but together.

There was always a sort of romanticism, I thought, in the idea of doomed lovers. Maybe all those stories I read weren't too far from the truth.

“We’re gonna be okay,” I tell him, so softly that the wind almost takes the words right off my chapped lips. “This whole shitshow’ll be over soon.”

Connie snorts and grinds his cigarette out beneath his heel. “Yeah, one way or another, I reckon you’re right.”

“What’s that s’posed to mean?”

“I just…” He trails off, shoulders slumping inwards as he leans against the railing. “Jean’s doing his best to keep everything light, but you ain’t wrong about all this. The jobs are gettin’ harder. Our chances of catching a few bullets are only going up.”

From the time I was a child, I’ve always had Connie two steps behind me, following me into whatever half-cocked adventure I could dream up, his loyalty unwavering. It took realizing that he’s got no reason to have faith in me anymore to make me see that I took his friendship for granted. If both of us were the men we used to be, this conversation wouldn’t be happening. Failure wouldn’t be an option and tomorrow would be too far away to think about. But as it stands, I’ve lost any credibility I might have had at holding this (and myself) together, and Connie’s got more than himself to think about.

“If you’re that worried about it, take Sasha and go now.” The words rattle against the back of my tongue, garbled by the gruffness I try to coat them with in an effort to not sound so hurt. For someone who’s never put much stock in anyone but myself, I’m far more easily wounded than I should be whenever people don’t believe in me anymore.

Maybe it’s because the faith of others is all I’ve ever been. A story’s useless once people stop being invested in it.

“I ain’t gonna do that,” Connie says.

“Why not?”

“Because Jean’s too much of a mess himself to make you see sense, and Mick’s too far away!” he shouts, slamming a fist down on the railing before he pushes himself off and rounds on me. “Your brother tried to knock some into that thick head of yours, and it apparently didn’t work.”

“I’m sticking to Mick’s plan, ain’t I?” I lash back, my denial that there’s a problem as good as an admission that there is.

“And you think I don’t see those wheels you got turning in your head?” asks Connie, jabbing a finger into my chest and growling, “You don’t wanna go to Mexico. You _want_ your goddamn blaze of glory, and if I’m the only one around here with any kinda chance of keepin’ you from doing something stupid, I sure as hell ain’t leaving you now.”

I’m a little kid running through the tall grass in the pasture again, playing at outlaw, and there he is, two steps behind me. Only this time, the guns are real and the stakes are higher. And he’s still here. He’s still here, and he’s still trying to save me.

I’ll never figure out just what it is that I’ve done right to deserve the people who think I’m worth salvaging.

“I’ve done a lotta stupid things, Connie,” I admit, not caring enough to fight how fragile I sound.

He frowns up at me for another long moment, but finally backs down, running a hand across the back of his head and sighing, “Yeah, you have. No need to add to an already-impressive track record.”

And it’s back to silence, Sasha and Jean’s unintelligible conversation on the other side of the door and the sound of the snowstorm blowing itself out, of tires on the road and a sleek new Model A skidding into the parking lot.

Connie laughs, jamming his hands in his pockets. “Speaking of Mick…”

“Aw, fuck me, he wasn’t s’posed to be here until tonight,” I groan, watching the car pull in and make a slow loop around the lot before I grab Connie by the back of his jacket and shove him back towards the door. “Get Jean outta here.”

He just stands there and blinks at me. “Why?”

“Because breaking up a fistfight ain’t on my list of things to do today.” Things have been tense enough without Michael and Jean going at each other’s throats, and I don’t know how much of that I could take before hauling off and punching a hole in a wall. As shady as Motel Guy is, he’s been kind enough to not sell my ass to the cops, so damaging his property isn’t something I’m keen on. “Tell him something’s wrong with the car, take him out for a soda, I don’t fuckin’ care, just keep him clear of the room for a bit.”

“Jean’s a big boy, he don’t need me to babysit him.” The car’s engine turns off. I don’t have time for this argument.

“And Michael’s a bigger boy who still needs a babysitter at twenty-two, so I’ve got my work cut out for me.” Connie rolls his eyes as I back away from the porch and into the snow swirling in the parking lot, making desperate gestures at the door. “Listen. Have I talked about how much I like Jean’s face? I love Jean’s face. It’s beautiful. I don’t want my brother to destroy Jean’s face, so you need to _get him outta here before –_ hey, Mick.”

“Hey, kid.” Michael’s dressed for the weather, a warm-looking wool peacoat pulled on over his suit, leather gloves that probably cost a normal person’s earnings for a month, a thick green scarf wound around his neck. He looks every bit as put-together as he did the last time I saw him, the only betrayal of that image the heavy, sleepless shadows under his eyes. But almost as if he’s seen me catch on to that unspoken fatigue, he smiles that same old shit-eating grin, pulling me into a tight hug before pulling back to get a better look at me. “You look like shit.”

“Thanks.”

“You ever heard of this new invention they got called a telephone? You can use it for things like lettin’ your brother know you’re still alive.”

“If I was dead, the papers would tell you faster than anyone else could,” I drawl, trying to bite back the shivers racking my body for as long as it takes to keep my brother looking the other direction from where Connie’s ushering Jean and Sasha out the door of our room. “Besides, I ain’t exactly had time for social calls.”

“Don't reckon you have.” Mick doesn’t miss much, never has, and my fleeting glance over his shoulder is enough to make him turn around, eyes hardening when he sees Jean climbing into the passenger seat of the stolen Packard. “Where's the rest of the Bodt Gang off to?”

I know his game almost as well as he does, know that if I can keep his focus, he’ll eventually back off. It’s more of a physical maneuver than a mental one this time, sidestepping so that I’m interrupting his field of view again. “Lunch, probably. You said to leave a trail. Nothin’ better than showing up in public. We were gonna clear outta here tonight, anyways.”

He glares after the car as it slides out into the frozen road, but scoffs once it’s out of sight, rolling the tension off his shoulders and settling back into something a little brighter. “Damn. I was lookin’ forward to having a talk with Jean.”

“Just because Eren ain't here to keep you from beating him to a pulp don't mean I'll let you,” I warn him. Michael can be a pain in the ass, and God knows he pushes things too far – it’s a family trait we share – but it’s all about letting him know where you stand. If you don’t _tell_ him to back down, he’ll walk all over you, but solid convictions are some of the few things in the world he actually respects.

Will he try to sweet-talk and wheedle his way around you until he gets what he wants? Absolutely. It’s how he came out of our childhood with all the crimes but only about half the punishments that I did. But the difference between me and the rest of the world is that I don’t have too many reservations about socking my brother in the jaw, and he _definitely_ shuts up after that.

“Fair enough,” he shrugs, huffing out a cloud of breath into the air before shuddering and pulling his scarf a little tighter. “Can we continue inside? It's cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey out here.”

I look at his expensive coat, and then down at my own ratty shirt, and then back to Mick. He smiles again, a knowing, cat-who-swallowed-the-canary type of smirk that I feel like a dumbass for finding endearing. I spent so many years hating him, and admitting to myself that I kind of missed the bastard is a bittersweet resolution. Grumbling something under my breath about money turning him into a wimp, I elbow him in the ribs and head back towards the room. He throws a snowball at the back of my head. By the time we make it back to the porch, we’re both grinning.

I’ve lost a lot of things, but there’s at least one thing I’ve gotten back from this whole disaster. It feels good to have a brother again.

While my cold-numbed fingers struggle with the room key, Motel Guy peeks his head out of the office at the end of the long porch, flecks of snow falling into his oil slick of a hairdo. He looks at Mick, nods, and then retreats back inside with a sharp bang of the door. Blinking in confusion, I finally get the room open and dive into the merciful heat of the indoors, shaking the snow out of my own hair and looking back at my brother. “So this contact of yours…”

“I'm under contractual obligation to not tell you the details of Gunther’s business practices,” says Michael, pulling off his scarf and gloves. “It's nothing too morally reprehensible, though. Although I guess ‘morally reprehensible’ is all kinda relative comin’ from folks like us.”

“You can cut the salesman talk, Mick. Ain't no one here for you to impress.”

He looks at me oddly, like he’s not sure of whether or not to believe me, smile frozen in its faltering place across his lips as he looks back and forth across the emptiness of the motel room, eyes searching and settling on me—

And then he crumbles.

All of the fast-talking, cavalier confidence falls away in a second flat, gone as quickly as the coat he sheds and drops in a heap on the unmade bed. Michael’s shoulders sag under the weight of how _tired_ he must truly be, something far more fragile in his expression now that the smirk’s not there to cover it up. I’ve only ever seen him like this a handful of times, when we were kids, back before everything went to hell. I saw it in the days before he left, when the fights with Pa got worse and I’d walk into our room to see him nursing black eyes and split lips as the price of his sharp tongue. It’d be there for a fraction of a second before he’d see me standing there and straighten his spine, fix me with a bloody grin and crack some joke about how the old man must be getting feebler with age since he still had all his teeth after a lifetime of backtalk. He’d cover it up, but it would be there. And it’s here now.

This is him, I realize. This is him when no one’s watching.

He sets his bag down on the bed, rifling through it before he pulls out a hefty glass bottle of amber liquid and plunks it down on the nightstand. “We need to talk.”

“What’s this,” I laugh, “a peace offering?”

“That’s a thirty-year-old, forty-dollar bottle of Scotch.”

I squint down at the label. Hand-written, some distillery in Scotland with too many consonants for me to try to pronounce. “I’m listening.”

Seeing Mick so ill-at-ease makes something uncomfortable tingle at the base of my neck. I’ve never been able to count on him for much, but there used to be a sort of steadiness in now any bad situation could seem more manageable with him around acting like it was all dirt off his shoulder. The look of a man carrying the weight of the world doesn’t suit my brother any better than it does me.

He grabs a couple of chipped glasses from the kitchenette, pouring two overly-generous portions of Scotch and handing me one as he sits down in one of the rickety chairs. “We didn’t get to talk back in Dallas. Not really.”

No, we didn’t. We were too busy trying to beat the shit out of each other. But it was easier that way. A few bruises and blood spatters, and it was enough to let me lie to myself that it was all over now, that we’d never have to address the years sitting between us like an empty wasteland. I’ve learned that it’s not really possible to ever go back to the way things were before, not with Mick, not with Jean, not with anything, but sometimes it’s nice to pretend for as long as you can before reality finally decides it’s time to hit you in the face with a plate glass window.

Pretending’s all I have anymore.

“We talked about all we needed to talk about,” I mutter, staring down at the glass as I turn it idly between my fingers.

“The hell we did,” Michael scoffs, knocking back half his drink in one gulp without so much as a flinch. Apparently becoming a practiced drinker as a coping mechanism runs in the family. “Look, you can hate me for leavin’ you if you want to. God knows I kinda hate myself for it. But I owe you an explanation.”

I squirm in my seat, the same way I always do when people bring what they owe into the equation. Hearing about someone else’s debt inevitably leads my brain down the path to my own, and thinking about all the recompenses I’ll never be able to make feels like a steel chokehold winding ever-tighter around my throat.

The radiator makes a sound like a death rattle. Mick looks at me with this expression caught between regret and hope, and I kind of want to punch it right off his face, but instead I sit down and take a drink, the whiskey going down velvet-smooth and nursing a small bloom of warmth in my chest. “So explain.”

He sighs and leans back in his chair, looking up at the water-damaged ceiling so he doesn’t have to watch me watch him trip over his words before he gets them rolling. “I… I blew outta Telico with no plan and no money, thinkin’ I could make something work. Signed on as a salesman for a couple different companies, but it wasn’t enough to keep me fed, let alone take care of you. I figured I’d save up and come back for you as soon as I could, started doing side jobs, hustling poker, running a few scams here and there. It worked, for a while.”

“So why didn’t you come back then?” I ask.

“’Cause I did something real stupid.”

“Something stupid like…”

“I met a girl.”

I stop mid-drink and stare at him. _“Really.”_

He laughs as he watches me trying to work it out, confused between the new information and what I saw back in Dallas. Mick just smirks over the rim of his glass, a mischievous look in his eye. “My tastes have a bit of a broader range than yours, brother mine.”

“Apparently,” I deadpan.

“Her name was Sarah,” he says, and anything light in the conversation fades, a faint twitch at the corner of his mouth like his lips don’t want to wrap around the name. “Met her in a bar up in Milwaukee. She was runnin’ cons up in that direction, too. Runnin’ ‘em much better than I was, to tell you the truth.  Told me I had potential. ‘Course, I was head over heels. Ran with her for a long time, finally saved up enough money to come back to Telico and get you.”

“So why didn’t you?”

Rather than answering me right away, Michael pours himself another drink. “Because I woke up one morning and she was gone, along with all my cash.”

Something twists in my stomach. Empathy’s never been my strong suit, but I don’t really have to reach for it here, the shadows in my mind spinning a story about what would happen if I were to wake up one morning alone, with Jean and everything we’ve built and destroyed together disappeared down some dusty road. And I know, I _know_ he’d never do something like that – the solidity of the fact that he’d never hurt me that way is the last thing I’ve got left to stand on – but even thinking about it makes me feel like the floor’s been yanked out from under my feet.

I don’t know what to say to him. Not _I’m sorry,_ because I won’t break one of my few remaining principles, especially not to apologize for something that isn’t my fault. Not _Are you okay,_ because we both know the answer to that. Words are Michael’s weapons, not mine, so I hope he knows enough of them to see the meaning behind the breath sucked in through my teeth and a whispered, “Fuck, that’s rough.”

“She warned me that you can never trust anyone. I was the fool in that whole shitshow, but I sure as hell learned my lesson,” Mick shrugs, frowning down at the shallow layer of Scotch at the bottom of his glass. “But that’s why I didn’t come back. I was going to. If things had gone the way I planned, I’d’ve had you outta there a month before shit ever hit the fan.”

“And instead, we get this,” I muse, looking around at the frigid motel room and the reflection of us in the grimy window. Years later, and we’re both wrecks. You can see how bad I’ve gotten just by looking at me, but Michael’s always been the better one at covering his scars. Turns out, all it takes to find out how deep his wounds go is a bottle of whiskey and the unspoken understanding that comes from a kindred spirit, someone who knows what it’s like to feel like you’re too wicked and lost and _flawed_ to love, and that must be why everyone leaves.

We’re in the business of wicked, lost, flawed things, my brother and me. Always have been. We just never knew back then how big of a price we’d have to pay for it.

“And instead, we get this,” he nods, leaning forward to click his glass against mine before downing the rest of his drink. “Can’t say I regret it, though.”

“Eren, huh?” I venture a guess, bringing the subject up now that Jean’s not around to have a goddamn coronary at the mention of it.

Mick shrugs, looking at the bottle of whiskey like he’s mulling over the prospect of another drink. “Eren, and I’ve taken a few important things to heart ‘cause of it. Can’t learn that fires are hot ‘til you get burned.”

“But mostly Eren.”

He doesn’t deny it. On the contrary, he confirms it without saying a word, setting his empty glass aside and smiling. Not a smirk, but a smile, something softer than I knew him to be.

“I didn’t expect him,” he says, a contemplative lull to his voice. “He crept up on me. Reckon you can understand that.”

I nod, thinking about the way I woke up one morning on some nameless country road in a state I don’t even remember and realized that I couldn’t imagine ever waking up without Jean next to me again. “Reckon I can.”

“You know that’s why we’re handlin’ things the long way ‘round, right?” asks Michael, drumming his fingers on the tabletop. “I’d be fine with doing this quick and dirty, but I can’t put him in the line of fire. Not any more than he’s already been dragged into it.”

Well, at least he’ll admit to giving us the run-around for no good reason other than to keep Eren from getting his hands any dirtier. I’d be angrier about it than I am, but I can’t lie well enough to say that I wouldn’t do the same in his position. Grabbing the bottle and topping my drink off, I tell him, “I can respect that.”

“But you don’t agree with it.”

“If you love him so much, I don’t see why you’d bother helpin’ us,” I grumble, sulking into my glass and chasing the warmth the alcohol lends to my blood. I’ve been cold since a long time before we showed up in Iowa.

“I’m helpin’ _you._ ” His lip curls on the emphasis, a snarl that he catches after it’s already on his face and reins back in to a milder look of distaste before he starts talking again. “I’ll save your ass because you’re my flesh and blood and I love you, but if your boy was on fire, I wouldn’t piss on him to put him out. The only capacity in which I give two shits about Jean is the capacity in which I make sure to keep him far away from the people whose lives he’s fucked up.”

“Eren can make his own decisions—“

“Eren’s made plenty of his own decisions, and they’ve all gotten him hurt,” he snaps, not even willing to hear a counterpoint. And for him, that’s weird. Mick loves to argue, because he almost always wins. I’ve never known him to shut down any chance for debate before it started, depriving himself of his favorite game. It takes me a second to understand that it’s because he doesn’t think this is a game anymore. My brother, quite possibly for the first time in his life, is taking something seriously. He takes a moment to skirt around his lapse in composure, sucking in a deep breath and forcing his voice to even out back into its standard smoothness. “So now _I’m_ makin’ the decision to keep him as far away from this as I can while still helpin’ you out. I owe both of you that much.”

The best whiskey I’ve ever had, and with one statement, he makes it go sour in my mouth. Bastard. “Don’t make this about some kinda debt.”

“ _Everything_ is about debt, Marco,” Mick laughs, bitter and cold. He does this thing when he’s hurt where he gets all pedantic, tries to treat you like you’re a child who doesn’t understand so he keeps up an illusion that he’s still in control. I’m too old and have seen too much shit for it to work on me anymore, but I can see the effort and the ache it tries to mask. He grimaces around the words like they’re a bitterness clinging to the backs of his teeth, staring down at his empty hands and whatever ghosts they hold that I can’t see. “It’s what makes the world go ‘round. You might not accept it, but most people’s lives revolve around makin’ up what they owe. I owe you an explanation, I owe you the help I didn’t give you when you needed it, and I owe Eren enough love to keep him from gettin’ more hurt than he already has been. I want a clean ledger for once in my damned life.”

I sit there in silence and stare at him for a long stretch of time. “Jesus Christ, you’ve changed.”

Michael raises an eyebrow. “And you haven’t?”

Fair point. I huff out something that was supposed to be a laugh and sigh, “Love fucks you up, huh?”

“Not always,” he whispers.

Not always. My only experience with love has been one that ended with me down an eye and most of my humanity, but maybe it doesn’t have to be like that for everyone. Michael looks worn-out and weighed-down, but there’s a hope in him that I don’t have anymore, something that makes him brighten up a little as he sits there and promises me that love doesn’t have to end in disaster, even when disasters like him and me are the ones involved.

“So why him?” I ask, wanting to keep my mind from turning inward to how every kiss with Jean has felt like a ticking time bomb for months.

“Because he saw me,” he says, a finality to it that doesn’t sound like him. Mick’s one for embellishments, for spinning webs around every word until you’re not sure what he’s saying. Simple truths have never been his style, but this one rolls off his tongue so easily that I’m left wondering just how much we’ve both changed, that he’s become as familiar with clean-cut realities as I have with convoluted lies. He must see my confusion, because he smiles and looks down at his hands again, seeing possibilities instead of ghosts. “People like you and me, we’ve gotta play a lot of parts and spout a lot of bullshit. I’ve been so many different people for so many different cons that most of the time I can’t even remember who I am anymore. But Eren _saw_ me, y’know? When you find someone who knows you even when you don’t know yourself, you’d better hold on to ‘em. You don’t find people like that twice.”

You don’t find people twice who will look at you, lost and bitter and half-mad, and love you anyway. You don’t find people twice who will take your hand and walk alongside you down the road to ruin, paying no mind to the blackness at the end or the hounds nipping at their heels so long as you can both get lost in each other. You don’t find people twice who will take your broken body and your broken spirit and try to stitch them back together as best they can with their own fractured love. There aren’t too many people in the world that can love folks like me and Michael, because loving us means loving our demons and our faults too.

So when we find our people, we cling to them, we drag them down. We don’t let go. Because you don’t find those people twice.

I look over my brother’s shoulder at the dent in Jean’s pillow where he curled up beside me last night, and I whisper, “No, you don’t.”

Michael follows my line of sight, and I can trace the inner conflict as it hits him, his mouth opening to say something before it catches with a rattle in his throat and he pushes it down, sitting back in his chair and bringing a loose fist up to press against his lips. Whatever it is, I wish he’d just spit it out. Watching him struggle for something that always came so easily to him doesn’t make me feel any better about the situation at hand.

“I’m gonna tell you something, and I don’t want you to come at me guns blazin’ until you really think about it, okay?” he finally says, so apprehensive that I half-expect him to not press on at all. But he looks at the unmade bed again, takes a breath and looks me right in the eye and tells me, “I don’t think Jean is who you think he is.”

Frowning at him, I set my glass back on the table with a dull thud that rings too-loud in the silence that falls between us. “The hell’s that s’posed to mean?”

“It’s s’posed to mean that I’m on the outside lookin’ at the two of you with a clear head, and you ain’t,” says Michael, trying very hard to sound diplomatic. The look on his face like he’s just stepped in a pile of dog shit when he looks at the signs of Jean’s presence lingering around the room ruins the desired effect a little bit. “He’s got something he ain’t tellin’ you.”

“I trust him.”

“Then you’re an idiot.”

“Oh, fuck off, Mick,” I grouse, taking a gulp of whiskey and cursing my high alcohol tolerance. I need to be more drunk than I am to deal with this.

“No, _listen_ to your brother for once!” Michael snaps, standing up and starting to pace. His hands reach out in front of him like they’d frame his ideas for me if they could, fingers stuttering in midair before he shoves them in his pockets and rounds on me with a frustrated growl. “I’m in a business that requires me to know when people are hiding something if I don’t wanna get fucked over or shot. Everyone has skeletons in their closet. Some have a few bones, some have whole graveyards. I know when folks are hiding things, Marco. I’m a professional at it. And Jean’s hiding something from you.”

I shake my head, denial pressing at the back of my tongue so hard and heavy that it’s difficult to get out in anything other than a choked refute. “Bullshit.”

“And you’re hiding things from him.” There’s something I _can’t_ deny, and Mick knows it, watches me with this infuriating, knowing expression as my denial falls away into something a little closer to fear. He can’t possibly know about Eastham, about Joplin, about everything I’ve kept locked in the nastier parts of my own nightmares, but he doesn’t need to know the details. He sees enough of them in my silent admission, not bothering to revel in the fact that he’s outflanked me again. This is a victory he never wanted, a point he never wanted to make, his voice almost pained when he asks, “What makes you think that it don’t work the other way around?”

“Anything I haven’t told Jean, it’s been for his own good,” I tell him, the same thing I’ve been telling myself for months. The excuse was starting to lose its potency long before my brother decided to pick it apart at the seams.

Michael laughs again, still cold and humorless, but it’s softer this time, more to himself than to me. “See, people do that. We tell ourselves that the selfish things we do protect the people we love, and it helps us sleep at night. In the end, it’s all about how well you can lie to yourself. I’m damn good at it. The fact that I’m a jealous bastard and the price of it means makin’ Eren feel even more powerless in all of this than he was before might not keep me up at night for a few more years, but it’ll come around. We’re not good enough to be selfless, you and me. And neither is Jean.”

Maybe Jean’s not good. But he’s brave, and he’s stubborn, and he’s smart and strong and beautiful and _mine._ Mick has the right of it in saying that he’s no good, but neither am I. It’s hard enough to live with the dark things I’ve got hiding too close to the forefront of my mind. I can’t believe that Jean has his own crop of them, can’t believe that there’s anything he’d keep from me. The weight of my own secrets is almost enough to suffocate me. I wouldn’t live through the weight of Jean’s on top of them.

Neither of us are good, but in a relative sense, it’s easy to see who’s the lesser of two evils. Jean’s not hiding anything from me, because he _can’t_ be. If both of us are that lost in the mire of our own unspoken horrors, then we have no hope of finding our way back to the light.

So I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it, because I _can’t._ “You don’t know him.”

“But I know this story,” says Mick. “I know how it ends.”

“How could you possibly know?”

“I know because _I’ve been there_ ,” he hisses, planting both hands on the table and leaning towards me in just the right place to interrupt my view of the bed. “I saw somethin’ I didn’t wanna believe in someone I loved once, and it ended with me broke, stranded, and profoundly fucked-up for years. Pretending something doesn’t exist don’t make it go away, brother mine. Just because you love someone doesn’t mean they can’t hurt you.”

I don’t listen to him, because I _can’t._

“You’re wrong,” I croak, shaking my head so hard that my ears ring.

“I hope to God I am,” Michael sighs, “but I know I’m not. It’s high time you remembered that we aren’t playin’ in an arena of good people here, Marco. Remember that, and think on it. That’s all I ask.”

It’s not a lot to ask for, but it’s more than I can give. Instead of thinking on it, I grab the duffel bag full of our cash from under the bed, dropping it down on the table in front of my brother. “Here. Not nearly what I’d hoped to have, but it’s a start.”

Mick purses his lips and flips down through the stacks of bills, whispering a tally under his breath before he looks back up at me. “What is this, forty-five hundred? This won’t do shit.”

“You think I don’t know that?” I huff, remembering all the bullshit it took to even get that much, drowning in the fact that we’ve got to slog through even more bullshit just to have any kind of hope. “Jean thinks everything’s jake, but I’m more than aware that we’re behind.”

“Of course Jean thinks everything’s jake, because Jean’s a goddamn _child_ who can’t see beyond the end of his own nose.”

“Jean also has ears and can hear people talkin’ shit from a mile away,” says Jean, carried through the door on a blast of icy wind from outside, Connie and Sasha on his heels.

“Nothin’ I wouldn’t say to your face,” Michael counters with a smile, so pleasant that you can almost _see_ the vicious intent coiled under his skin.

Jean’s eyes narrow. “Marco made me promise not to kick your ass when you finally showed, but I can always break promises.”

“Yeah, you’re pretty good at that from what I’ve seen.”

“You smart-mouthed little _weasel,_ I should—“

“Both of y’all should shut the hell up, is what you should do,” I groan, dragging a hand down the unscarred side of my face and getting out of my seat to step between the two of them. If a fight happens, I won’t be able to stop it. Jean’s weedy, but he’s quick, and Mick’s got enough pent-up animosity that he’d probably sucker-punch me just to get me out of the way. It’s easier – and has less possibility of injury to any parties involved – for me to defuse the situation. Jesus, how bad have things gotten that _I’m_ the peacemaker? “Jean, go back outside.”

“But—“

“Michael, go to your car.”

“But—“

_“Now!”_

“Funny, how you’re takin’ his side after all that shit you said about what a snake he was,” Jean seethes, trying to get that parting shot in, always has to have the last word.

“How the hell is this me takin’ _anyone’s_ side—“

“If you’re gonna talk about snakes, you might wanna look in the mirror, first,” Michael lashes back, all veiled insults gone in favor of a more blatant attack. Fuck me, this is going downhill faster than I can keep up with.

“That’s right, turn the blame on someone else; it’s what you’re best at,” says Jean, spitting the words like poison while his fists ball up at his sides. “What kinda bullshit did you feed Eren to convince him to keep your ass around?”

“I gave him more honesty than you ever did.” It’s almost _more_ terrifying, how even Mick’s voice is in response to that, how collected he becomes, a smirk stretching across his face until he’s a smug caricature of himself, picking up the last of my drink and swirling the whiskey around in the glass with a contemplative hum. “Gave him plenty of other things, too. Lemme tell you, Jeanboy, you missed the boat on that one. He gives _great_ hea—“

For a smaller guy, Jean fights like a damned hellcat, nearly bowling Connie over in an interrupted effort to literally _lunge_ across the table at Michael’s throat. “You _son of a bitch!_ ”

“Easy there, tiger,” Connie grunts, looping an arm around Jean’s waist and hauling him backwards out the door. “C’mon, let’s go.”

“Your ass is _mine,_ Bodt!”

Michael just stands there and smiles, allowing a pause for dramatic effect before he tilts his head and muses, “Technically, it’s Eren’s.”

_“I’ll kill you!”_

“Quit it,” I grumble, throwing Mick’s coat at him and waiting for him to tug it on before I drag him outside by the lapel. “C’mon.”

The snow’s stopped, leaving the parking lot blanketed in white, icy stillness that soaks through the legs of my pants and stings my skin as we tromp over to Michael’s car. A few yards away, I can hear Jean cursing and Connie trying to talk him down. All sympathy for my brother vanishes, because no matter what he’s been through, he gets to drive away from this while I have to clean it up. Maybe that’s why I’ve always loved running so much. Your messes look so much more manageable when they’re miles behind you.

“Did you _have_ to egg him on like that?” I ask, wincing at a particularly colorful insult that Jean pulls out of his arsenal, echoing across the parking lot and pulling a scandalized gasp out of Sasha.

“No,” Michael shrugs, fixing me with a wolfish grin. “But it was fun.”

“You’re like fuckin’ twelve-year-olds, both of you.” I suppose I should thank him for the temporary distraction. For a few minutes, I got to think about keeping him and Jean from killing each other instead of the pathetic amount of cash he loads into the passenger seat of his Model A. “We’re gonna work on getting some bigger jobs in as fast as we can. If we keep workin’ our way north, we should get outta farm country and into places where the banks are actually worth half a shit. I’ll call the garage once we get something worth you makin’ the trip to pick up.”

“Call the garage before then,” he chides, elbowing me in the side and reaching into the inside pocket of his coat to hand me a sealed envelope. “I’m tired of only havin’ the papers to tell me what you’re up to. Try to aim for Chicago. I’ve got people there that can give you a hand, and the money’s good, if you know where to look. Hell, I’ve got an apartment y’all can squat in, if you promise not to fuck in my bed.”

“Reckon we can swing that,” I nod. I reach out to shake his hand, but he grabs my arm and pulls me into a hug, not letting go until I laugh and hug him back. “Take care, Mick.”

“You too,” he says, climbing up into the driver’s seat and starting the engine. Jean shouts something on the other side of the parking lot again, and Michael looks over in his direction before he turns back to me, the beginnings of a frown inching into the corners of his mouth. “And think about what I told you. I know you don’t want to, but just… think about it.”

I can’t.

“Stop worryin’ about me and worry about gettin’ back to Texas without driving headfirst into a brand new shitstorm,” I scoff, dancing around the subject and shutting the driver’s side door behind him.

Mick rolls his window down, wrapping his scarf around his neck and shrugging. “No promises.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I laugh, reaching through the open window into the car. “Stay outta trouble if you can…”

“Stay outta jail if you can’t,” he finishes, the same way we did when we were kids, giving my hand a tight squeeze before he reaches out and ruffles my hair like I’m five. Asshole. “Love you, kid.”

Despite the cold cutting into my bones, I stand in the parking lot and watch his taillights until they fade out of sight.

“Your brother is the human embodiment of a migraine,” Jean grumbles once we’re all back in the motel room.

“You’re tellin’ me,” I nod, leaning down to kiss his cheek and give his shoulder a quick squeeze. “C’mon, we gotta get on the road if we’re gonna get this job done in the next couple days.”

“What job?”

“The job we’re drivin’ to Chicago to do, now pack your stuff.”

“Chicago?” Jean blinks, cheeks still flushed from anger and the cold as he stands next to the bed and crosses his arms tight over his chest. “Why the hell would you want to go to Chicago?”

“Mick thinks it’s a good idea,” I shrug, holding up the envelope that he handed me before he left as an answer.

“Mick’s got his head up his ass.”

“Two hours ago you were tellin’ me that his good plans were the only thing he had going for him.”

Jean makes like he’s about to argue but stops at the last second, chewing on the inside of his cheek and taking a moment to dull his gut reaction down to something a little more logical. “Chicago’s a big city, Marco. Lotta cops.”

“And a lotta money,” I counter, tearing the envelope open and scanning a few notes on Chicago’s Federal Reserve Bank in Mick’s sharp, spidery penmanship. “Not to mention that Michael’s got a whole network up there to help us out.”

Frustration tugs at the edge of Jean’s every movement, stopping some motions short and making others too-sharp and jerky as he yanks his suitcase off the floor and throws it down on the bed. “And does Michael pay his network to help us better than Uncle Sam’ll pay them for handin’ over our cold corpses?”

He’s fighting the plan because it’s not _his_ plan. It’s not out of anything petty or spiteful – well, maybe a small part of it, but not the entirety – so much as it is out of practice. It’s been so long since I was the one laying our plans and outlining our futures, those times long gone behind months of fevers and scar tissue. Jean got used to having the reins in the time that I couldn’t, and he was good at it. But the burden of plotting our destiny was hard on him. It still is. I pretend not to notice that he spends most nights wide-awake, starting at the ceiling, the same courtesy that he extends to me when he pretends to sleep through me clawing my way out of nightmares with screams clogging my lungs.

I won’t let him carry that weight anymore. Not when there’s someone else who’s just as competent and just as willing to do it.

“Darlin’,” I say softly, cradling his face between my palms. “I need you to trust me.”

He swallows hard, leaning into the touch and letting his eyes flutter shut. “You know I do.”

“We need that money, Jean. And there’s no time to get it from small jobs. It’s gotta be one big hit-and-run. We don’t have another choice.”

After a moment of tense silence, he nods, pushing my hands aside so he can curl into my chest, so much smaller now that he’s not fighting with everything he’s got to make himself seem big. It’s been forever since any kind of tenderness between us wasn’t met with tension from one side of the equation, too long since I could let myself hold him and he could let himself let me. We both hold onto it longer than we should given the time constraints, standing beside the bed while Connie and Sasha pack their things, a silent island in the middle of seas that grow more stormy by the second. Jean sighs into the crook of my neck after a few minutes, lips moving in a murmur that’s half a kiss across the scarred skin. “I hate it when you do that, y’know.”

“Do what?” I ask, pulling back to look at him.

“Make sense,” he says.

“It’s a recent development, I think.”

He laughs, but I can hear the heartbreak in it, the forced angle of his smile fading as he steps back and looks at the rumpled clothes stuffed in his suitcase. “Someone’s gotta have a level head around here, I guess.”

“Hey,” I whisper, pushing the suitcases out of the way to sit down on the edge of the bed and take both his hands in mine. Jean looks at the floor. I twine my fingers up with his. “Look at me.”

When he does, he looks _ancient,_ a weariness that pulls down at him until I fear he’ll collapse right there in front of me.

Oh, darling.

“You held us all together for five months,” I tell him, brushing my thumbs across his chapped knuckles and wondering how the tables ever turned this way, that I’d have to be the one giving him absolution for his self-accounted failures. Jean’s so good at remembering what he did wrong that he’s completely lost sight of everything he’s done _right,_ so deep in the hole he’s dug for himself that he’ll never get out without someone to help pull him up. Even if I’m not good for much anymore, I’m at least good for that. I’m good to sit there and look up at him and kiss his hand and remind him of what he’s forgotten. “Now that I can shoulder some of the load again, let me. You don’t have to make all the calls and carry all the responsibility. You’re not alone. If you can’t believe in Michael, then believe in me.”

Jean sucks in a shuddering breath and blinks the glassiness from his eyes, standing a little straighter. “Okay.”

“Okay?” I ask.

“Yeah,” he nods, flipping his suitcase shut and grabbing the keys from Connie. “I’ll go start the car.”

Something hovers in the air even after he leaves the room, even after I leave it too, even after we’re sitting in the car and driving up the road north in silence. It’s not the comfortable sort. It’s the sort of quiet that _should_ be filled, that has a missing piece. But I don’t dwell on it, because I can’t. I don’t think about how, in my gut, I feel like there was something he didn’t tell me, standing in that motel room and clawing his way back from the edge of breaking.

We drive until the buildings of Chicago split the skyline like spears, and I don’t think about Jean hiding something, because I can’t.

* * *

Mick’s apartment is in a good part of town, and it’s nice, if you don’t account for what a fucking mess he left it. It’s easy to see that he hasn’t been home in weeks if not months, a thin layer of dust coating everything in the place, clutter left where it fell, scribbled notes about clandestine meetings and business deals scrawled onto scrap paper and left on any solid surface.

Ma would have a heart attack if she saw the state of the place. Maybe that’s why he keeps it like this.

It feels like walking through the shadows of all those years he lived without me, moving through the empty rooms and looking at the relics of an existence I never got to hear about. Michael’s always been a pack rat, and the habit didn’t leave him in adulthood, shelves and tables crowded with little knickknacks from all over the country, matchbooks from a bar in Memphis, a pile of poker chips from Atlantic City. While Connie and Sasha and Jean collapse into a tired heap in the living room, I snoop through my brother’s life, content in the knowledge that he’ll never find out I did it. It’s not like I want to steal anything, or even dig up some kind of dirt on him from the midst of his possessions.

It’s a curiosity I was too proud to ever show him to his face. What did you do without me? Where did you go? Who did you become? Did you go out and chase all those dreams we had as stupid little boys? Were you like me, finding out too late that they were all nightmares in the end?

I don’t find answers. All I find are souvenirs of his travels and glimpses of cons he’s already run, drawers stuffed with silk scarves and closets full of tailored suits.

The closest thing I get is sitting face-down on his bedside table, a framed photograph of a Michael that looks much younger, not so different than he did when he left home, standing with his arm around the waist of a stunning young woman with dark hair and big eyes and a smile like a razorblade.

Her name was Sarah. I wonder if he makes a habit of lying in bed and watching her smile frozen on paper, wondering where she went with his money and his heart. I wonder, because it’s what I would do, and Mick and I have proven time and time again that we share the brotherly bond of punishing ourselves up to and past our breaking points.

The sound from the living room starts so quiet that I don’t even notice it until long after it’s been going, scales and arpeggios that float back the musty air in the hallway and morph into something livelier, Latin flares and brassy crescendos that pull me out of Mick’s bedroom and Mick’s life and back into my own, peeking out the door to see Jean sitting on the couch with his trumpet, playing while Connie and Sasha sway to the music.

It’s been almost a year since the last time I saw him play. He’s just as beautiful now as he was then.

“What’s goin’ on in here?” I ask after hanging back to watch for a few more minutes, not willing to interrupt him when he looks so at-ease with his fingers flitting back and forth over the keys.

Jean looks up at me with a shit-eating grin, playing another little lick before he lowers the instrument to his lap and drawls, “Practicing for the mariachi band.”

Connie and Sasha laugh, and so do I. And it almost seems like some sort of poetic justice, that the four of us are standing here in an apartment full of dusty memories, a repository for Michael’s sadness that he runs from every time he gets the chance. It feels right that I come back from trying to figure out my brother’s life only to see a small spot of brightness in my own.

You can never go back to the way things were before. But you can remember. And sometimes, one good memory can make a world of bad ones seem worth it.

I walk out into the living room and lean down to kiss him, and I go searching for one of those good memories, the swelling noise of Annie’s club, the taste of champagne and second chances, Jean in his New Year’s suit, lit up from the inside with dreams we believed so much that we’d live to see in reality. “Yeah, well, spare me the ‘La Cucaracha’ and play me something you’d play in one of them big bands you always talked about.”

He pauses for a second, hands stilling against the polished brass, but after a while he brings the mouthpiece back to his lips, the first few bars of ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’ floating mellow and sweet into the sunset-light slanting through the dusty curtains.

This, right here, this is a good memory. And I’ll hold onto it.

God knows I’ll need to.

* * *

The Federal Reserve Bank is huge and imposing, probably was designed to look that way, throw potential thieves off their grand ideas. Sasha went in to case the place out this morning and said that it was just as swanky inside, lots of locks and vaults and stuffy tellers that looked down their noses at her from the second she walked in the door.

But imposing or not, it’s a little late to back down now, sitting across the street in the car with guns held across our laps. I find that most of the time it’s easier to just charge headlong into hopeless situations. At least then, if everything goes to hell, it comes as a surprise.

“It’s bigger than I thought it’d be,” Sasha says, sitting in the front seat and craning her neck to look at where the top of the building extends up to the skyline.

“It’s _colder_ than I thought was possible,” Connie gripes, pulling on a pair of gloves he stole from Michael and turtling down into the neck of his shirt while mumbling something about Mexico not coming soon enough.

People go in. People come out. We wait.

“This is our last job, ain’t it?” Jean asks.

“Second-to-last, I think,” I nod, clicking the last of the ammo into my Tommy gun and fiddling with the safety. “I wanna pull one more big one in Texas before we jump the border, just to say ‘fuck you’ to the laws. But we’re gonna get our haul here and go, yeah.”

He doesn’t really respond to that. Just looks down at the BAR in his white-knuckled hands and says, “Oh.”

“You okay, darlin’?”

“It’s just…” Jean trails off, looking out the window at the people walking down the snowy street, passing us without any idea that we’re here. “We were gonna come up here. Before everything happened, you always used to talk about it, remember? ‘If not New York, then Chicago,’ you always said. You were gonna work with the big mob bosses and I was gonna play in jazz bars every night.”

Of course I remember. I remember the days when everything seemed brighter. When all we wanted was just a few steps out of reach and we were on top of the world, immortal, ten feet tall and bulletproof. I remember those days in the few times that my head decides to let me have a good dream, waking up next to Jean in pale sunlight filtered through motel windows, living like we didn’t know what consequences were.

I remember when the world caved in with the sound of shattered glass and those days were gone forever.

“Things changed,” I tell him.

Things changed. We changed.

“We should’ve come here when we had the chance,” he says, fingers pressed to the frosty glass of the window like he could reach out and gather Chicago and all of our could-have-beens into his hand.

“I dunno about that,” I say, shaking my head. “Baby Face Nelson got shot dead last year, Al Capone’s in Alcatraz half-crazy with the clap, and God only knows how many others ended bloody. Chicago seems like it’s got a way of puttin’ famous names on headstones. I don’t particularly wanna stick around and see what it does to Marco Bodt.”

Jean’s fingers close into a fist against the window, and he’s shaking, trembling against the cold and the sting of lost possibilities. He can’t hold the life we never got to have. “But we could’ve had something here. We could’ve had a life, and you—“

“—probably would’ve gotten the itch the same way I always do after a while, and it would’ve been back on the road to a similar or worse fate than what I’m already workin’ with. If you’re gonna spin could-have-beens, darlin’, at least be realistic.”

 He sinks into quiet again, watching the passerby with their little lives and little problems, so caught up in the day-to-day. When he speaks again, I almost don’t hear him. “You think we’ll ever really be able to settle down?”

“I don’t know.” I answer truthfully; because there’s no lie I can tell about that to protect him. “But for you, I’ll try.”

“I’ll miss this,” he whispers.

“Will you?” I ask.

Jean reaches down and pulls the ring out from where it’s been tucked under his shirt. He’s finally put it on the chain I got for him, the soft glimmer of gold stark against the chafed skin that the old twine rubbed raw. He turns the ring over between his fingers a few times, tracing the facets of the citrine before he tucks it away again and checks the ammo clip in his gun. “Yeah. I won’t miss all the shit that comes with it, but I’ll miss runnin’ with you.”

“You gonna miss the constant threat of death?”

“Death threats from dead men don’t mean much.” He smiles out the window at the busy little people with their busy little lives, so focused on keeping their heads down that they can’t see what’s right in front of them. “Take a look around. You and me, baby, we’re the only ones left alive anymore.”

We’ve got that much. Whatever else we don’t have, whatever else we’ve lost, we’ve got the fact that here and now, we’re so _alive_. And that’s not a running thing. That’s an us thing. That won’t change whether it’s here or in Dallas or on some beach in Mexico, living out our days in the quiet way we never expected. That’s what we have, our certainty. If I’m with him and he’s with me, we’re alive, and that’s more than most people ever get.

It’s not the time or the place, but I lean over across the seat and kiss him soft and slow, feeling him like you feel your frantic heartbeat in your bones. “I love you. Whether we’re runnin’ or not.”

“Whether we’re runnin’ or not,” Jean echoes, flinging the door open and grabbing my hand as we head into the bank.

* * *

The job goes almost eerily well – no shots fired, no one hurt, and no lawmen showing up until we’re hell and gone with so much money in tow that I can’t even count half of it without losing my place and having to start over. The entire vault of a Federal Reserve is more than enough to take care of Jean’s family and the four of us. Hell, with that kind of cash, forget living on a beach in Mexico. I’m buying us a mansion.

Still, even with that victory, we’re careful, we ditch the getaway car across town and head back to Mick’s place on foot, guided through the back alleys by one of his network, some weird lady dressed in a three-piece suit with glasses and a crazy look in her eye. She does her job, though, and we pay her well for her silence – after all, now we can afford to – retiring for the night to regroup.

For the first time in months, I sleep like a baby, Jean curled up beside me with a peacefulness in him that I never thought I’d see again.

 _“You’re sure you don’t wanna – I_ did _put it away, Eren, right hand to God – meet me somewhere in Kansas?”_ Mick asks over the phone the next morning while we’re all packing, ready to pile in the car Connie went out and stole before sunrise to make our last run to Dallas.

“No need,” I tell him, holding the receiver to my ear with my shoulder while I throw the last few stacks of cash down into the big briefcases we’re packing it in for travel. “Jean’s gonna insist on seeing his folks, so we might as well just drop it off to you in Dallas. Makes more sense to do that.”

_“Your call, man – yeah, baby, up in that cabinet over the workbench.”_

“You sound like you’ve got your hands full,” I snort.

 _“Tragically, I don’t,”_ Michael sighs, a rattling whoosh in my ear. _“He turns into an uptight workaholic to process his anxiety. I can’t get within five feet – Ow! Aw, c’mon, pretty thing, you know I don’t mean nothin’ by it!”_

“He throw a wrench at you?”

_“I’m not obligated to confirm or deny that.”_

I laugh, reminding myself to shake Eren’s hand once we get to Dallas. “You’ll be happy to know that your bed is undefiled and that Sasha washed the dirty dishes you left in your sink, all while mumbling about such a sharp boy livin’ in a pigsty.”

 _“Tell her I said many blessings upon her sweet little head,”_ he says. I can hear the smile in his voice.

“We’ll be down on the day and time we talked about, yeah?” I ask, looking down at the scrap of paper that had been stuffed in the envelope he gave me back in Iowa. “Same place we agreed on?”

_“You got it. Drive fast and take the back roads, kid.”_

“I always do.”

Jean walks over once I hang up the phone, yawning and stretching his arms up over his head. “We’re stoppin’ in Kansas for the night, right? I can’t sit in the car for a straight shot from here to Dallas.”

“We’ll see,” I nod, tilting his chin up for a kiss and looking around to see if I left anything behind. “Go load your stuff up. I’ll be right there.”

He walks out the door after Connie and Sasha, yawning again, and I’m left alone in the apartment. Connie took all of my other things out earlier, which leaves me just carrying the cash. I’m halfway to the door when I see the edge of Jean’s trumpet case peeking out beside the couch, and I smile to myself, leaning over to pick it up. He was so groggy this morning that he must not have remembered that it wasn’t with his other stuff. Turning back over my shoulder, I call out the open door, “Hey, Jean, you forgot your—“

When Jean put his trumpet away last night he forgot to flip the latches on the case. When I pick it up, it falls open, and the trumpet spills out onto the couch cushions.

Along with a pile of envelopes.

And I know. I know what they are before I even pick the first one up, and there’s something in me _screaming_ to run, to shove them back in and seal the case and forget that I saw them, because all I hear on loop in my head is the heaviness in my brother’s voice when he swore that Jean was hiding something from me, and I can’t, I can’t…

I can’t.

I can’t run away from it, not when I’m standing there and flipping the envelope over, reading Jean’s address in my own handwriting. The envelope is sealed.

And so is the next one.

And the next one.

And the next one.

Every single one.

My world caves in.

Jean’s silhouette appears in the doorway, and my trembling lips wrap around the end of my sentence, so quiet that it gets lost in the cavernous emptiness of Mick’s apartment. “…trumpet case.”

Jean takes one look at what he’s walked in on and goes paler than I’ve ever seen him. “Oh, God.”

“You never opened them.” My own voice sounds like it’s miles away, distant and ringing in my ears.

“I can explain.” His breath is hitching in his throat, ragged and panicked as he reaches down to gather up all those sealed envelopes in shaking hands.

“I thought of you, y’know. When I was in there, in Eastham, all the shit that happened to me, I…” I’m numb, limited to monotone syllables that roll off my tongue and feel meaningless, empty. “I’d wake up in the morning and think, ‘Why am I not dead yet?’ And then I’d think of you. And I’d get up.”

 _I waited for you,_ my shattered soul wails on an agonized mantra, all of the darkest things that I locked away crawling out from the shadows and wrapping merciless hands around my throat. _I waited for you._

And I was a fool for doing it.

“Marco, sweetheart…” Jean just stands there, holding the letters to his chest like he could hide them, caught between stepping towards me or running away.

“Five months I sat in a living hell, prayin’ for anything to just _make it stop,_ and YOU COULDN’T OPEN A GODDAMNED LETTER.” And my numbness explodes into a _scream_ that tears at my throat in a blaze of pain. Nothing feels good – nothing ever will again – but I latch onto that pain with desperate hands and chase it, because it’s _real._

And that’s how it’s always been, apparently. Nothing’s real except for the hurt when you find out it’s all been lies.

“I’m sorry,” Jean chokes out, tears welling up in his eyes. “I’m so sorry—“

“Don’t.”

Jean takes a step forward, making like he means to reach out for me, but then the letters shift in his arms and he remembers that they’re there, clutching them to his chest again and staying rooted to the floor. He won’t even let go of what he’s done in the name of holding me while I break. “Baby—“

“DON’T.” God, it _hurts,_ an ache that shoots from my throat all the way down to the pit of my stomach, and I wish that I could feel more rage than whatever _this_ is, this twisting, howling monster of loss and grief and betrayal that makes me curl forward in search of something to hold me up now that my last support is crumbling away. The fall is not quick. It’s not pretty. Everything I am shatters messily, with screams of protest and every word like venom on my tongue, determined out of gut instinct to tear _everything_ down if I’m already going. “Don’t stand there and cry about how sorry you are like it’s gonna fix anything!”

“I didn’t know what else to do!” he pleads, shoulders heaving with every sobbing breath as he struggles for words that make any kind of sense. “I thought that you were gonna be gone for sixteen years and I was hurt and fuckin’ _scared,_ I was…”

“And you think I wasn’t?!” I shout, the truth I kept from him for his own peace of mind hitting the air with a bloody, raw crackle that sounds so much weaker than I want it to. “You think that I wasn’t stuck in there goin’ through shit that makes a shard of glass to the eye look tame?! The first letter ain’t here, so you read it, you saw, you _knew…_ ”

He shakes his head rapidly, clinging to ignorance like the last resort of the damned. “I never read it.”

I stop, going quiet, and it feels like the last spot of calm before Armageddon. “What d’you mean, you never read it?”

Jean’s lips work soundlessly around something _else_ he meant to keep from me – God, I’m a fucking hypocrite for wondering just how much of us has been a lie – stuttering out, “I got the letter, and just seeing the envelope fucked me up. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, I was so tired of bein’ alone that I drove over to Eren’s house and when he saw it…”

“Jean, you’d better tell me the whole damn truth,” I hiss, “‘cause more lies ain’t gonna help you anymore.”

“He grabbed it from me and put a match to it, said I needed to let you go.”

And _there’s_ the rage, lighting a fire in the bloody ruin of where my heart used to be and filling me up until I can stand tall again, until I find something in it I can harness and use to keep me moving forward. “That jealous little piece of _shit_ —“

“He was tryin’ to help!”

“Help himself, you mean!”

“But the others, the ones you sent, I couldn’t get rid of them!” he rushes out, grasping at straws, trying to save something that’s already lost. “I tried, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Because I still loved you, I knew I did, but I was tryin’ so hard to let you go, I couldn’t get rid of them but I couldn’t read them either, please, you’ve gotta understand.”

“What made you open the last one, huh?” I laugh, a hideous sound, nodding at the letters in his arms with an accusatory snarl twisting me into something even uglier than I already am. “What stopped you from leaving me in Eastham to _fuckin’ rot?!_ ”

“The envelope,” Jean tells me between tearful gasps for air, curled in on himself and shaking against the cold reality that’s finally come to claim its toll from the both of us. “The writing on the envelope, the address. I could tell your hands were shaking when you wrote it, so I opened it.”

“Bet you regret that now.”

“No!” For one brief moment, the strength comes back to him, a conviction in his denial that almost seems honest. “Of course I don’t. I regret not getting you outta there the day they took you. I regret being too much of a coward to help you when you needed me. I regret a lotta shit, Marco, but not a single second I’ve spent with you.”

“Then why keep the letters?” Why bother with the relics of the months he spent trying to keep me away, the months I spent thinking that if I could plead hard enough and make him see everything he was to me, that he’d come for me? Why keep that reminder around, if not for the regrets tied to it?

“So I could remember!” he shouts, all the anguish that’s been eating him alive rising up to swallow him whole. He looks down at the letters fingers tracing over the dents my pen made in the paper a year ago. “So I could be better and maybe one day I could make up—“

“It’s always been about _making up what you owe_ , hasn’t it?” According to some, that’s all life is. God, I can’t look at him. I look at him and I feel sick. Shaking my head, I make myself move, sidestepping the wreckage of what’s left of us and moving to storm past him out the door. “You keep books like a damn loan shark, Jean. I’m just one more mistake, ain’t I, one more bad thing for you to balance out. You never lo—“

“Don’t you say that,” he cuts me off, dropping the letters to the floor and running after me, his hand closing around my wrist and tugging me around to face him. His eyes _blaze_ behind the tears, all the determination that comes with one last shot at saving something that’s already gone. “Don’t you _ever_ say that.”

“Don’t wanna hear the truth, darlin’?”

I go to yank my hand back, and he holds on tighter, refusing to budge until I look at him, fighting through the way my guts ache when I do. For the first time since he walked in the room, Jean looks _angry,_ squeezing my hand so hard that my bones ache, standing behind his last conviction like the final charge of a hopeless battle. “I have loved you. Through all your crazy, through all your _bullshit,_ Marco, I have loved you. You don’t get to stand there and tell me I haven’t.”

“You say ‘I love you’ like it’s a bandage.” The wounds are still too fresh to let me think about healing them. I’d sooner bleed out than have his love pressed like a scrap of cloth over a bullet hole. “‘I love you’ won’t change anything.”

He’s losing his grip, scrabbling at the edge, and it’s going to be so damned hard, watching him fall when I’m already down here at the bottom. Panicked, Jean lets go of me for the time it takes to bring both hands up to press against my cheeks, pulling me down until our foreheads are pressed together. “But I _do_ love you, I always have, you’ve gotta believe me…”

“I do believe you,” I tell him, because there’s no point in lying to him anymore. Not out of anger, or out of the desire to protect, or out of anything else. That’s what I owe, the price I’ve never wanted to think about paying. I owe him the truth. “And I love you.”

And that’s the sick part of all this. Every lie, every consequence, everything I should walk away from right now to save myself the hurt, and all I want to do is hold him. I’m a ruin of myself, and all I want to do is put him back together, kiss the tears off his cheeks and pull him so close that maybe we could cobble together one whole, beating heart between the two of us.

I love him. There’s never been any doubt about that. I love him so much that I’d let him ruin me again and again, because that’s how people like Jean and me love. We only know destruction, how to take people and lives apart, but goddamn, it can be pretty as it all goes down in flames. And I’ll burn. I’ll climb right on the pyre so long as I can do it with him.

Jean manages a watery smile, twining his arms around my waist and burying his face in my shoulder. “So we’re gonna be okay?”

“No.” I won’t lie to him. Not anymore. Even if the pain written across his face when he pulls back to look at me is more than I can take, even if pulling his hands from where they clutch at my shirt makes me feel like I’m ripping out my own insides. I won’t lie to him. “I love you. You love me. But you still left me sittin’ in Eastham for five months because you didn’t wanna face what opening those letters would mean. You still abandoned me when I needed you.”

“I never wanted to hurt you,” he says in this awful, wavering little whisper, right before he breaks down sobbing, arms wrapped around his chest like he could stop his heart from breaking.

It’s not that easy, love. We’re more fragile than we like to admit, and we can only take so much.

“I know you didn’t,” I say, reaching up to brush his hair back from his face. “That’s why you lied to me. God knows I’m not innocent on that front, but you let me think that I’d spent all that time tryin’ to make you see how much I loved you when all that got me outta there in the end was a stroke of luck and your guilty conscience. There’s nothin’ that can make that okay.”

“But you said—“

“I said that I love you, and I do. But this ain’t a storybook, and love doesn’t always fix everything. I love you.” I kiss him, and he clings to me the way you only cling to something that’s slipping away. I can’t lie to him. Even if it means breaking him. “I love you, but I can’t forgive you.”

And somehow, I pick up enough of my broken pieces to walk away, leaving Jean standing in the living room surrounded by the wreckage of every lie we ever told.

* * *

Connie drives until we hit Kansas. The whole trip passes in dead silence. The Springers heard enough of the argument to know that bringing it up would be a horrible idea, and no one bothers with small talk. We drive, The snow blurs into barren fields and dusty earth, and for all the time I’ve spent telling myself that messes are more manageable if you run from them, it’s hard to run when Jean’s sitting in the back seat, staring straight ahead of him at nothing. I torture myself because it’s what I’m good at, fleeting glances in the rearview of him twisting his ring around on its chain, over and over again until it’s too much and I look out the windshield for hours that stretch to eternity, seeing nothing.

And I don’t think about the fact that I have nothing now, that my last solid ground has crumbled beneath my feet, that the one thing I trusted has fallen through. I don’t think about how I still love him so much that it feels like I’m falling apart over and over and over again.

Because I can’t.

We hole up in a foreclosed farmhouse for the night. Jean disappears back in one of the bedrooms, Connie and Sasha give me space, and I sit on the moth-eaten couch and watch the sun go down, sleep an impossibility and a respite that I probably don’t deserve.

The restlessness always comes when I stay in one place too long, and I no longer have an anchor to keep it from pulling me out the door and into the falling night.

It’s quiet, nothing but the wind blowing through dead grass and my footsteps slapping against rain-starved dirt. I don’t know what I was looking for – peace, distance, _something_ to make the boiling darkness in my head shrink back to the point where I can manage it – but all I find is a gnarled tree, dead limbs stretching out in a crooked silhouette. At first, when the chirping starts, I think it’s in my head. But it gets louder, and that’s when I see it sitting there: a nightingale perched a few feet away, singing long after all its brothers have gone home to roost. It sings and sings, like its little lungs don’t need air.

There’s a whole compendium of things I’ve lived through that would have had every right to drive me mad. Anything in the long list of horrors I’ve traveled down had the potential to push me over the edge, and I’m too lost to tell if it’s foolishness or irony, the fact that what breaks me in the end is birdsong.

An anguished howl cracks in my throat, and in the space of a second there’s a gun in my hand, a recoil in my wrist, a shot fired without a damn given who hears it. I can’t hit things reflexively anymore. The shot goes wide and the bird takes off, flapping into the higher branches, and I fire again and again until the pistol clicks uselessly in my hand and the ground collides with my knees, hard and cold and lifeless. The beating of the nightingale’s wings stills, and it stares down at me from the top of the tree, something merciless in its eyes as it begins to sing again.

And there, under the twilight sky of a world that’s never been right, I lose everything, my last desperate grip faltering and falling, falling, spiraling down into a void so deep that there isn’t the slightest hope of getting out. I cry until I start laughing, because there’s really a certain type of liberation in it. Maybe this is the freedom I’ve been looking for, the feeling you get when you finally know that you’re too far gone to save. We sit there, the nightingale and I, our songs fighting to be heard over each other until mine wins and it flies off, somewhere far away from the sobbing laughter rising up into the dark.


	26. Jean

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I DON'T EVEN. WHAT. WOW. I'M SORRY THIS TOOK SO LONG.
> 
> This chapter's listening homework (I do not apologize for all the Delta Rae):  
> [The Meaning Of It All](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2iNw4Dmr50) by Delta Rae - for the heartbreaking JM talk  
> [Stealing Cars](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXR1uusV8lg) by James Bay - also for the heartbreaking JM talk  
> [Chasing Twisters](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgRN1UMtdu0) by Delta Rae - a song that will make you understand Marco so much better seriously please listen  
> [Scared](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nJVBkOWBBE) by Delta Rae - a song that will make you understand Jean so much better seriously please listen
> 
> Warnings for this chapter: gore, graphic violence, minor character death (it's not one of the boys)
> 
> I have a [tumblr.](http://southspinner.tumblr.com)
> 
> I am... wow. Wow. I'm sorry.

I’ve never done well with loneliness.

Back in a life I barely remember, I lived constantly beneath the gaze of other people, stiff-backed dinners and parties where I was shown off like a trophy, constantly reminded of the role I had to play. When I was younger, being alone seemed like mercy, because it was the one luxury I never got to have. It wasn’t until I was older that I realized it was a curse.

When you’re out in the middle of life’s carnage, you can forget all of the nasty things in your head, because you have to. There are parts to play. People to see. Jobs to do. It’s not until you’re alone that all those nasty things come up and constrict themselves around your neck.

It’s not until I’m alone in a dark bedroom with just me and my heartbeat and all my shortcomings choking me to death that I finally break.

I don’t keep track of how long it takes me to fall apart, curled up in the middle of a sunken mattress with each breath feeling like a battle. The world outside sinks into a sort of muted backdrop, things like Connie and Sasha’s hushed conversation in the next room or a succession of sharp gunshots outside registering but forgotten moments later. The only thing I have is the old linen beneath my fingertips and the tremors wracking my body so hard that my bones ache and the fact that I am _alone_ , so terribly alone in this grave I’ve dug for myself. I don’t mark the passing of time by anything other than that loneliness, counting the hours not in even increments, but in the times I realize that Marco isn’t beside me.

The night wears on. The sun rises. I don’t sleep, and Marco doesn’t come to bed.

For so long, he’s been a buffer to all the most merciless parts of me, keeping me from turning them inwards to the point that I rip myself apart. Without him, I have nothing to stop me from letting all my faults sink razored claws beneath my skin and drag me down into a death spiral of should-and-shouldn’t-haves. My trumpet case sits in the corner, haunting me with the paper corners sticking out of the seams, and all I can hear over the sound of my own solitude is an endless loop of _I can’t forgive you._

It’s okay, sweetheart. I can’t forgive me either.

That loneliness follows me into the morning, into dragging my dead-weight body out of bed and feeling like I’m made of either glass or lead as I sit at the kitchen table and let the world spin without me. Sasha grabs the few groceries we have left to make biscuits, Connie sits across from me and rolls his cigarettes, and I’m detached from it all, like a ghost haunting halls that used to be home. My life has sunken into muted monochrome, and I can’t feel fear, can’t feel anticipation, can’t feel anything.

Marco steps inside off the porch, takes one look at me, and then turns around and walks right back out. And I feel that. I feel that so much that it would tear me apart if there was anything of me left to break.

It’s dead quiet through breakfast and packing and all the way into the car, the miles passing in dust clouds and fleeting glances. I drive. Sasha sleeps. Connie reads a newspaper he picked up from God-knows-where, pictures from the beach on the front page, Marco’s smiling face, handsome and unscarred, so distant it feels like a dream. The harsh reality sits next to me and stares straight out the windshield for hours, refusing to look at me.

Somewhere between Oklahoma and the Texas state line, I clear my throat, and everyone jumps. “Where are we going?”

Silence. A few more miles. Marco keeps his eyes forward, but finally mutters, “Eren’s house.”

And I drive. And Sasha sleeps. And Connie reads his paper for the third time. And Marco stares out at the dusty horizon like he’s trying to find whatever it is that we lost somewhere in all the gunpowder and lies. And even with the knowledge that I’m crammed in a sweaty car with three other people, I am alone.

The Jaeger farm is eerie in in its silence, both Doctor Jaeger’s car and the slick little Packard that Mikasa drives to work missing from the drive. A bitter thought flits through my head that if Michael Bodt is so hell-bent on keeping Eren out of this, he’s got a funny way of showing it, given his choice of rendezvous points. But Eren’s house is safer than the garage, more out of the way and less likely to fall under scrutiny, and even though demonizing Mick comes as easily as breathing, I know Eren well enough to know that he probably had a hand in making sure we ended up here. I’ve still got someone on my side, regardless of how little I deserve to have him there. The ache in my chest lessens as we park in the barn, but returns full-force when I have to sidestep the bloodstains on the floor on the way out.

I can’t get away from any of it. Marco told me once that running was the only way he felt right, but it’s hard to understand when all I ever do is run straight into everything I’ve done wrong.

I’m a shitty person and a fool, but I’m not the only one in the world. I remember that as I walk into the kitchen and get accosted with the sight of an underwear-clad, smirking Michael Bodt poking a spatula at a skillet full of scrambled eggs. “Mornin’, boys.”

Groaning, I scowl and look at the empty space above his head. “Oh, for the love of—”

“I’ll go wake up Eren,” says Michael, twirling the spatula between his fingers with a stupid grin stretching lazily across his face. “Poor thing didn’t get much sleep last night.”

“Well, he’s settled in nicely,” Connie muses after Michael swaggers out of the kitchen and up the stairs.

“He does that,” says Marco, something so tired in his voice that it hurts to hear it.

It could be an accident, the way he leans against the counter and looks over at me, an eternal moment passing before he averts his gaze. It would be easier if he looked at me with anger or hatred or any of the things I’ve been turning on myself since I walked into Michael’s apartment and saw him with those letters in his hands. It would be easier if I could just deal with more of the same, disgust, revulsion, anything but the overwhelming _sadness_ that passes between us in those few seconds.

I could deal with being the deceit and destruction that Marco managed to escape. It’s harder to be the lost possibility that he mourns.

“Y’all made good time,” Eren says, hopping off the bottom step and rounding the corner into the kitchen, bedhead hair sticking up at a million different angles and fingers still fussing with the buttons on his shirt. I try to remember what he looked like a year ago, without the dark circles under his eyes and the weight of my mistakes sitting on his shoulders. He’s shrugged some of it off in the past few months, the worry not so present in the way he holds himself, something almost happy lingering in the upturned corners of his mouth. But all of that disappears once he gets a good look at me - and it’s all too literal to be a metaphor about what that means in the scheme of our relationship - frowning and stepping around Michael to hurry over to me. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothin’.” The denial sticks in my throat.

“Anyway,” says Michael - still in his underwear, for fuck’s sake - throwing an arm around Eren’s shoulders and raising an eyebrow at Marco and I. “The fact that y’all made it this far is cause for celebration, despite _some of us_ bein’ mopey little pains in the ass.”

“Fuck off, Michael,” I snap.

“Ooh, scary. Come over here and say that again; I may just wet myself.”

“I’m liable to punch your teeth right outta your smart mouth and down your throat, you little—”

“All right, we’re not doin’ this,” Marco interrupts, stepping between Michael and me. He plants a hand against his brother’s shoulder and pushes him back a step, reaching out to do the same to me before he remembers who he’s dealing with and his hand stills an inch from my chest, fingers stuttering and curling into a loose fist before his arm drops to his side. I want to reach out to him, to grab his hand and say for the millionth time how sorry I am, but he won’t give me the chance, turning a wary glare from me to Michael and stepping back to stand in the kitchen doorway. “ _You_ and _you_ are to remain ten feet away from each other at all times, and you are not to converse. At all. Nobody’s got time for your schoolyard bullshit today.”

Michael scoffs and takes the food off the stove, talking to Marco over his shoulder as he goes. “Fine. Now that you’re here, we can discuss the division of the cash and our game plan for—”

“Mick, I’m not havin’ this conversation with you until you put on some pants.”

“Buzzkill.”

Marco’s eye twitches, but rather than saying anything else, he just grabs his brother by the wrist and hauls him out of the kitchen, the sound of their footfalls fading up the steps until it’s just the Springers, Eren, and me standing in the now-suffocating silence left in their wake.

“We’ll just…” Sasha starts, taking Connie’s hand and shrinking back towards the door that leads out to the back porch. “I’m sure y’all have a lot to talk about.”

Creaking hinges. The rattle of dry, warped wood against the doorframe. Quiet.

With just me and Eren standing in the eye of a storm that’s grown too wild to weather, it feels like the world’s finally giving me license to crumble. I’m too exhausted to even do that right, sinking with shaking hands and a heavy sigh into one of the mismatched chairs around the kitchen table.  I don’t have to hold it together anymore. Eren’s seen me break enough to know it’s just another bullet-point on a long list of disappointments, and in the face of everything and everyone else I’ve had to deal with, he’s by far the kindest. I won’t be spared his judgment, but it will hurt less than Marco’s. And with Eren, there’s at least a shot at empathy. We’ve both done horrible things to keep ourselves from facing the terrifying truth of just how much we loved someone.

“Okay, what’s wrong?” he asks, and I…

I don’t even know where to start.

Everything is wrong. Everything has been wrong for so long that I’m not sure I even remember what right feels like. I can’t trace the source back far enough to make sense of it. It goes further back than Dallas National Bank and shattered glass, further back than five months of sealed envelopes, than stolen kisses in sunset-painted bedrooms, than anything I can name. Everything’s been wrong since long before Marco Bodt ever hitched a ride into my life, and I’ve been lying to myself about it for so long that dealing with the consequences of it in the here and now is something I can’t begin to wrap my head around. I can’t think of a time and place to name for Eren that could touch how deep the rabbit hole’s become, can’t find a way to explain to him how Wonderland’s become a crypt.

“That letter you took from me and burned after they sent Marco to Eastham,” I whisper, settling on the ghost that’s been haunting me more often than the rest and counting it as something close to progress. “What did it say?”

Eren goes pale, knuckles whitening as his grip tightens around the edge of the counter. He won’t look at me. “I… I don’t remember.”

“You’re lying.”

“I was drunk and it was a year and a half ago, Jean. I don’t re—”

 _“Bullshit!”_ I shout, standing up so fast that my chair clatters to the floor behind me. There’s a small, struggling spark of rage fighting to ignite in my chest through all the cold and numbness, and I fan it because it feels like a last chance at motivation. For a second, I forget about the fact that I’ve torn down everything Marco and I built together, forget my losses, forget my hurt in favor of leaning over the table and balling my hand up in Eren’s shirt collar.

“Why does it matter?!” He lashes back, shoving my arm away. “I did a shitty thing that night, and I’ve been tryin’ to forget it ever since. But you? You’ve never mentioned it ‘til now.”

And with that, my respite ends. All that blind, directionless anger turns inwards, sharpens itself and plunges straight into my chest. I stagger backwards, fighting to stay standing through it and leaning against the table for support. Eren takes a step towards me, and I can’t make my body work enough to do anything but shake my head, keeping him a safe distance away from my fallout. I don’t deserve him keeping me upright anymore, and he doesn’t deserve to be treated like a crutch. If I go down, I can’t pull him with me.

“I kept the other letters he sent me,” I wheeze, panic rising up until my throat feels like it’s stuffed with cold cotton, warping my stammered explanations and making every breath a labor. “I kept them, and I never opened them, and Marco found them and lost his shit and I still don’t know what’s in any of them and _I need to know what the first one said!_ ”

Somehow, I’ve ended up sitting back in the chair I knocked over, the world spinning around me on a fragmented axis as Eren kneels down in front of me and tries to pry my fingers away from where they’re knotted up in my hair, tugging so hard that my scalp aches in a futile effort to keep myself grounded. He’s miles more gentle with me than I am with myself, making sure that he’s got me on relatively steady ground before he sighs, “Why in the hell would you keep those, Jean? Jesus.”

I can’t explain that again. Trying to will just pull me back to standing in the middle of Michael’s apartment with my world crumbling around me, reaching out for Marco only to have him recoil like I had Death itself on my fingertips – and now that I think of it, I probably do after all the destruction I’ve been up to my elbows in over the past year. I can’t talk to Eren about debts and red ledgers and being so lost in my own mistakes that I couldn’t see what was right in front of me, because if I try, I’ll just end up crumbling.

“Eren, please.” Instead, I fall back into the comforting familiarity of begging for him to help make it all better (or at least to enable me in my quest for my own self-destruction), looking up at him with my hands trembling in my lap and my voice cracking every few syllables. “I know I ask you for more than I should more often than I should, but I need to know. I need to know what it is I ignored while he was sittin’ in that place praying for me to answer him. I need to know—”

“Why? So you can torture yourself about it more than you already are?” Eren counters, slamming a hand down on the table. I’ve been away from him for so long that I’ve forgotten that the price of him working his magic to fix my messes is usually dealing with him not buying an ounce of my shit. That’s what I need. That’s always been what I’ve needed, but the idea of crawling up out of my own head to see things in the more rational light that Eren’s trying to cast on them is _exhausting._ I’m down too far, too tied up in the ropes I’ve crafted, and I just can’t get behind the idea of fighting to see a situation clearly just to have the results be the same. Regardless of whether or not I beat myself up for it, one thing won’t change.

“He’s done with me,” I choke, shoulders heaving against unshed sobs that collide with the backs of my stubbornly clenched teeth. “He’s never gonna forgive me, and no matter how much you wanna protect me, I fucked up. I need to know exactly what it is that he’s never gonna forgive me for.”

I can see Eren fighting with himself over it, pursing his lips and looking down at the worn surface of the table. In the moment of silence, it’s easier to hear the footsteps over our head, Michael and Marco’s muted voices upstairs growing louder in the heat of an argument with an unknown source.

Eren looks at me. I look at him. Upstairs, something hits the floor with a slam that shakes the kitchen and Marco yells, _“What the hell d’you expect me to do?”_

“I… The letter. He said he loved you.” There’s caution and premature hindsight in Eren’s every movement when he finally wins out whatever battle he was having with himself and says it. “And he said he was sorry.”

My stomach twists so violently that I feel acid burning at the base of my throat. “I’m gonna be sick.”

He was sorry. How many letters did I let sit there for months, never knowing? How many times did I turn a deaf ear to all those apologies in the name of protecting my own imaginary middle ground? How long did I let Marco sit in that hellhole thinking that it was all his fault, that the way he made me feel and everything we were together was something he needed to regret? What could I have done if I’d opened that first letter before Eren sent it up in flames?

At that final thought, the sick feeling fades and the spark from earlier blooms, something hotter, more alive, something I can latch on to. I look back up at Eren, all of me burns with the smoky blaze of it.

He catches on too fast for me to get any real momentum worked up, taking a step back from the table and rushing out a defense. “I thought he was trying to jerk you around. I looked at that letter and all I could see was you gettin’ hurt, so I lit it up.”

“That wasn’t your goddamn call to make,” I snarl, pulled up out of my seat on marionette strings, puppet limbs subject to the whims of my own anger.  It rises up around we like a wave until it threatens to swallow me, and I wonder if this is how Marco felt, staring at all those unread apologies. If it is, it’s better than what I’ve been feeling, a buoyant force that I can’t contain to the point that it spills over my lips in sharp, spitting phrases, electrifying the empty space that closes between us as I stalk across the kitchen towards Eren. “If you saw him when I got him outta there, if you heard the shit he’d say in his sleep for _months_ after… God, if I’d opened that letter I would’ve gone after him. I would’ve had him out before any of it happened. But _you had to protect me_ , didn’t you. Didn’t matter if Marco was gettin’ hurt so long as you had me nice and safe with you.”

“You’re mad at me,” Eren whispers, half-shocked by it.

“You’re damn right, I’m mad at you!”

He pauses for a second, mulling it over, and then nods. “Good.”

I stop short halfway to an infuriated scream, blinking at him. “What?”

“You should be mad at me. At the end of the day, I’m the one who told you to ignore the letters. I’m the one who lit the fuckin’ thing on fire,” says Eren, reaching out to lay a tentative hand on my shoulder. “I was jealous and scared, and I messed up, and I’m _sorry_. But I’d rather have you blame me than stand here and watch you blame yourself.”

Even now, even after everything I’ve done and he’s done and everything neither of us did, he’s still acting in my interests. Years down the road and miles apart, Eren’s still willing to shoulder my burdens, to take the hits I’m not strong enough to withstand, to bear the scars he gets from all my broken parts as he puts me back together again and again. I swore I’d stop doing this to him. I swore to stand on my own two feet and fight my own battles. I swore to let him be happy, content with someone who loves him better than I ever could, far away from me and all the chaos that comes in my wake.

I swore to never make him be my safety net again, but I am nothing if not a professional breaker of promises. The fact that I only last a few more moments before collapsing is just as predictable as the fact that he catches me before I hit the ground.

I say a lot of things that don’t even skirt the realm of intelligibility through the body-wracking sobs, but the front of Eren’s shirt gets stained with tears and endless repetitions of, “I lost him. He was all I had left, and I lost him.”

“Hey. Look at me.” It takes more effort than I think I have left in me, but I do as Eren says. He’s steady, quiet in a way he almost never is, and it makes all the conviction he has all the more real. “People are stupid, and sometimes we get upset and say things that we don’t mean. Even to the people we love. God knows I’ve said my fair share of shit that I regret to Mick. And you know what? _We’re okay._ We get mad and scream at each other and I throw shit and he slams doors, and then we realize what dumbasses we’re being and talk about it like grown-ups and apologize and _we’re okay_. Bein’ human is saying all those things that you regret. Bein’ in love is staying around long enough to make it better. And last time I checked, Marco was still here.”

I shake my head, sucking in a razor-lined breath and refusing to take any hope for fear of watching it break. “But he said—”

“Give him time,” says Eren, looking up at the ceiling where the sounds of the Bodt Brothers’ argument has faded. “Marco’s a hard-headed idiot with more issues than the Sears catalog, but he’s a hard-headed idiot that loves you.”

And it’s so many different kinds of sad, that I have to rely on Eren to tell me that because I can’t see it for myself anymore. There was a time when believing that Marco loved me was like believing in gravity - it was the force that held me to the earth, what kept me steady when everything else was tumbling around in chaos. Now, it’s something a little closer to believing in legends and old wives’ tales, the sort of thing that people say only works if you have faith in it.

I’ve always had faith in him. After all we’ve been through, that might be all I have anymore. It’s better than nothing.

“You’ll be okay,” Eren promises, wiping the last of the dampness from my face with an oil-stained shirtsleeve, and I almost have enough faith to believe him.

“Well, that remains to be seen, but it looks that way for now,” Michael says, swinging around the corner into the kitchen - fully clothed this time, thank God -  with Marco on his heels. “As I was just explaining to Marco, I’ve got sources who’ve informed me that Erwin Smith arrived in Chicago this morning. Our bait-and-switch plan seems to have worked.”

My moment of vulnerability is over. Eren’s seen me in my weakest moments for our whole lives, but I don’t want to let Marco in on this particular instance, and I’ll be _damned_ if I let Michael Bodt see it. So I take a deep breath. I roll my shoulders. Stomp it down. Lock it up. Tell myself that there’s a time and a place to break, and this isn’t it.

“Ackerman wasn’t with him?” I ask.

“He’s probably not too far behind. They’re trying to keep a low profile so the media doesn’t blow their cover and give you two a warning, so traveling separately is probably a choice made to those ends,” Mick shrugs, dumping some of the scrambled eggs he abandoned onto a plate and smirking at me around a mouthful. “Either way, the feds are up north and you boys are here. I’d call it a miracle, but that would be a terrible downplaying of just how good I really am.”

“Has Eren widened the doorways so your ego can fit through them, or are you just slimy enough to slip through without a problem?”

“And a fine ‘fuck you’ to you as well, sunshine.”

“What did I tell you two?” Marco grumbles, squeezing his eye shut and rubbing at his temples.

“And I told _you_ that I do what I want.” It’s an understatement to say that Michael grates on my nerves, but his cavalier attitude and stupid weasel-y grin are so far out of place in the current situation that I want to scream. I wonder if he even sees it, the weary stoop to his brother’s shoulders, the haunted sheen over his face. He has to, and yet he’s still acting as if everything’s just another piece on his grand chessboard, poking us around like pawns with little to no care for the cracks that will splinter should we tip over. There’s a measure of falsehood to his demeanor, though, something in the half-worried glance he shoots over to Marco that says he isn’t as relaxed as he wants everyone to think, and that’s the only thing that stops me from planting a fist in his face. “Anyway, you two are all set to jump the border whenever you please. I’ve got the money situation accounted for and Jean’s family set up to live comfortably for the foreseeable future.”

Marco sways on his feet, betraying his fatigue for a moment before he covers it up again, taking his hat off and running a hand back through his hair. “I don’t know if we could drive all the way down tonight. It’s been a hell of a few days.”

In the past seventy-two hours, we’ve robbed a national bank, driven across half the country, and completely obliterated Marco’s trust in me. It’s been a hell of a few days. And it shows in him, whether he wants it to or not, pulls down at his shoulders and casts shadows across the scarred planes of his face, hangs a heavy, bruised shadow beneath one eye and rubs the skin red around the other where he’s been wearing the patch too tight for too long.

“Au contraire, baby brother, you won’t be driving down anywhere at all.” Shaking his head, Michael grabs a sheaf of papers from the counter and hands them to Marco. Mick’s handwriting is too thin and cramped for me to read from where I'm standing, but there's a lot of it, scribbled directions and orders that he points out to Marco over his shoulder. “You’ll be driving east, getting on this cargo boat leaving from this pier in New Orleans, and giving this envelope to this man, after which the four of you will be bound for the stunning shores of Playa del Carmen. You’re welcome, by the way. You know how many folks get rewarded for robbing half of Texas blind - sorry, Marco - with a tropical vacation?”

“Why New Orleans?” Marco frowns, squinting down at the papers.

“No car to follow, no trail to chase, no people to spot you. Nice and tidy. It’s why I prefer to do my smuggling by sea, when the occasion calls for it,” Mick shrugs, like smuggling is as common an errand for him as going to the grocery store. “And once you get to Mexico where no one knows you, y’all won’t have to worry about the laws and possible extradition so long as you keep your heads down and your noses clean.”

A clean slate. It's supposed to be a gift, a light at the end of the tunnel. The infuriating self-satisfaction written all over Michael’s face says that he thinks he's done us a favor. A few days ago, I might have agreed with him. But now, I look at the promise of Mexico, of anonymity and safety and the time to finally sit down and process the past year and a half of my life, and all I see is an empty chasm. I've finally learned that clean-cut endings don't exist, that people like Marco and me don't get happily ever afters. Michael and Eren can't give us one. No one can.

Marco sees it. He knows that his brother is handing us the key to our own destruction, but he doesn't turn it down, trading in customary thanks for a sigh that gets lost under the rustle of the papers in his hands. “You really covered all your bases on this one, huh?”

Michael answers with a laugh, brushing imaginary dust off his shoulder. “What can I say, I’m a man of skill. You’re damn lucky you’re family or I’d be charging you out the wazoo for use of said skill.”

“Don’t be an ass,” Says Eren, elbowing him in the ribs.

“That’s like tellin’ me not to breathe, pretty thing.”

“Don’t I fuckin’ know it,” he snorts, rolling his eyes and reaching down to twine his fingers up with Michael’s. They hold on to each other as easily as they breathe.

I remember when I felt like that. I have to clench my teeth to keep jealousy that Eren doesn't need to see from spilling out into the musty air of the kitchen. I've ruined his happiness enough already to do it now, so I make myself choke down the fact that he has someone who will smile back when he holds his hand, tugging him away from the smoldering wreckage of Marco and I.

Michael looks like he's not done talking – big surprise there – but Eren stops him before he can start again. “They need to rest, Mick. Whatever it is, it can wait ‘til tomorrow.”

“We can’t stay here tonight.” Eren and Michael both look at me like I've grown a second head. Even Marco forgets the fact that he's trying to ignore my existence in favor of glancing up from his papers. Maybe they all think that the offer of rest is something that we should take while we still can, but I can only see it as another double-edged gift. I don't remember who I am when I'm not running. I don't really _want_ to. The prospect of remembering who I am without running, without the constant brushing elbows with Death, without Marco… it feels like the last nail poised over a coffin lid.

I'm not ready to lose all of that. I'm not ready to lose him. Not yet.

I cover up my own selfish motivations with the knowledge that every minute I stand here is another minute Eren is in danger of getting dragged down with me. “If we stay, that brings the hammer down on you two if something happens. I don’t wanna chance that.”

It's not a lie, but it's not the whole truth. I should know better than to try twisting words when I'm standing right next to someone who makes a profession of it, a cold laugh tailing a justification that already feels halfhearted. “Jean Kirschtein’s thinking of someone other than himself? Alert the media.”

“Michael.” Eren’s voice and eyes go hard, his hand tightening around Michael's as he tugs him with more insistence towards the kitchen door. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

Mick and I both adopt similar ‘oh shit’ expressions, although we wear them for entirely different reasons. He knows that he's pushed too far for Eren to let him slide anymore, and I'm scared of being left to share space alone with Marco for the first time since he found the letters. That fear spreads out through my bones and moves me a step forward without my knowledge, reaching out towards Eren in a silent plea. _Don't leave me. Don't let me face things I'm better off running from. You're the only one I have left who can protect me from myself._

But Eren and I left behind the days when we could speak in silence a long time ago, and now there's someone in his life whose disaster is more important to him than mine. The door swings shut behind Eren and Michael as they leave, and the kitchen falls into a suffocating vacuum of silence.

Now that he doesn't have to worry about his brother seeing him weak, Marco slumps down into the nearest chair like a marionette with cut strings, staring at the floor. The cruelest part of what we are – or were – is that he's always known what he wanted from me. Simple things. Love. Trust. A little bit of faith in him. The truth. I gave him what I could, hoping that it would somehow outweigh what I couldn't. Marco's always known what he wanted from me, but even now, I can't tell just what it is that I want from him. Every splintered thought turns into shrapnel, ripping me to shreds as I spiral into a war between the part of me that wants to keep my distance so I can't hurt him anymore and the other part, the selfish part that wants to hold him, to take the pieces of him that I shattered and gather them close because I've never been brave enough to be broken alone.

There's nothing I can do to bring him back. Marco doesn't do anything unless he wants to, and even he's not crazy enough to want to come back to something just as lost and dark and hopeless as he is. I know better than to say I'm sorry, but there's an outpouring of grief and formless pleas pulling tight at my throat, things that will only spill out and cause more damage if I don't channel them into something we can both come to terms with.

“Look at me.” Not an apology, not a justification. It won't fix anything, but even knowing that, I want it. I can't ask Marco to whisk me away from my problems anymore, can't ask him to fight my battles, or to shoulder my responsibilities, or even to love me. But this is one thing I can want from him, something solid left to cling to. “Please, just look at me.”

It takes a moment. There's a long pause where everything about him tightens, spine going stiff and jaw tensing. But when he does, the consuming sadness from earlier is dialed back into something a little easier to handle, a regret that's closer to nostalgia.

When the fists balled up in his lap loosen, his hands are shaking. “Jean…”

It's equal parts pain and comfort that Marco says my name the same way he always has. I could close my eyes and listen to him say it again, and we could be waking up in a motel room months before any of this, dancing in the back room of Annie’s club, driving down a dirt road with all of our problems fading away in the rearview. But my eyes are open, and we're in Eren’s kitchen, both of us more broken than we ever planned to be. He told me once that holding onto the things that will never change was the only way to stay sane, and in that moment, I'd held onto the fact that I loved him and he loved me. I’m still holding onto it, clinging with desperate hands to something slipping.

We've come too far for me to not love him. He's in my soul now, ingrained in me. Whether or not that's still true for him, it's the last thing I've got left to fight for.

Marco starts to say something else, but the muffled voices out in the hallway rise up, the thin walls of Eren’s house not doing much to keep the argument just between him and Michael.

 _“I told you that I was keepin’ you outta this from now on_ — _”_

_“This is my house, and if I wanna let them stay for one night, I can!”_

A pause. Michael's voice goes softer, sinking into a tone I've never heard him use before. _“This whole shitshow’s gotten too dangerous, Eren.”_

 _“You think I don’t know that?”_ Eren snaps, an offended edge along the reply.

_“I think you don’t know the sorta trouble you can get in for harboring fugitives.”_

_“More than you can for helping them flee the country?”_

Michael's reply gets lost in the creak of hinges from the back door, Connie and Sasha peeking over the threshold to make sure the storm has passed before they come back inside. They look like they're on the tail end of an argument of their own, Sasha's eyes red and puffy and Connie looking beyond exhausted, but they're holding hands as they move across the kitchen, a united force even in turmoil.

“So, what's happening?” Connie asks, a not-quite-answer coming in the form of a harsh spike in volume from the hallway.

 _“Marco’s my family_ — _”_

 _“And Jean’s mine!”_ An impact rattles through the frame of the house with a sharp smack, the sound of Eren's palm colliding with the wall. _“I don’t have to ask for your permission or your blessing.”_

_“I never said you did!”_

_“No, you just treat me like I’m an idiot who doesn’t understand anything I do. Just because I’m not neck-deep in the underworld like you are doesn’t make me a goddamn child, Michael, and I am_ sick _of_ — _”_

_“Why do you have to fuckin’ fight me on this?! Are you really so bull-headed that you can’t see that I’m tryin’ to keep you safe?!”_

Connie’s eyes go wide, and he turns away for the door, mouthing _‘Yikes,’_ over to Sasha, who answers with a solemn nod. Marco goes back to clenching his hands in his lap, avoiding my gaze and looking more and more unstable with each word that makes it through the wall.

 _“And is your head really so far up your ass that you think any of this is about me?!”_ Eren half-shouts, and a quiet falls in his wake, so heavy that it's hard to breathe. When he speaks again, though, he sounds almost tender, a soothing lull that calms even the tension running down through my veins. _“They need us, Mick. He needs me. One last time. And I know that’s hard for you, but you need to let me do this.”_

 _“Okay.”_ Michael’s reply is tight and wavering. Vulnerable. If I weren’t so emotionally exhausted, I might have it in me to be surprised. _“Okay. I’m sorry. I just… I’m tryin’ to keep it together until this is all over, but I’m scared and_ — _”_

_“I know. I know, baby. It’s okay.”_

_“I love you.”_

_“I love you too. We’ll talk about this later, okay?”_

Being human is saying all those things that you regret. Being in love is staying around long enough to make it better.

I look at Connie and Sasha, still standing together in the eye of our self-crafted storm. I look at Eren and Michael, edging back through the door with cheeks anger-flushed but hands intertwined. I look at Marco. Marco looks at me.

And I dive out the back door before any of them can see me break again.

The air is cool and dry, dust coating my lungs as I suck it in with ragged breaths, the Texas winter as gray and lifeless as it’s ever been. I can’t even think of the could-have-beens anymore. It might be a little easier if I could imagine snow falling on the windowsill of a warm New York apartment, but all I get is the mournful howl of the wind across the barnyard, echoing outside even after I’ve slammed the barn door behind me and sunk down against the wall.

Time loses all meaning while I sit there, marking the minutes or hours in silence cut by panicked wheezes. The cool starts to feel cold, but it’s not much of a bother. I don’t know if I’ll ever be warm again. The shadows of the world outside follow the sun’s progress, shifting across the dusty floorboards, playing tricks in how they bend and stretch across the bloodstains that will never come out.

And it’s funny, how I keep running back to my biggest mistakes like I could find some comfort in them. Maybe after all this time, I’m still searching for solidity, still trying to find it in the irrefutable truth that I will inevitably destroy everything I love in the end.

The door rattles open beside me, and my muscles ache with the effort it takes to turn around to tell Eren that I’m unfixable and best left alone.

Marco looks as lost as I feel, his grip tightening on the doorframe as he looks from the rusty stains on the floor to me curled up beside them. “Can we talk?”

I’m not sure what there is to talk about. Where we went wrong? How it all came down to this? There are no words that could pass between us and bring anything good, but somehow I’d rather be burned alive at his hands than freeze in his absence. I answer with a slow nod, and Marco steps inside, shutting the door behind him and folding himself down onto the floor beside me.

For a talk, we sit through a lot of silence, both of us staring straight ahead.

“Look,” I finally say, too defeated to care that it shows in every word. “When we get to Mexico, if you want me to just grab my share of the cash and go, I understand.”

“Don’t talk like that,” he whispers.

“But you said—”

“I know what I said.” Even now, he’s beautiful. Tired and sad and scarred, and he’s still so beautiful that it hurts to look at him. A person I can’t even remember being fell in love with the way his eyes lit up when he had something to say, and whatever’s left of me still loves whatever’s left of him, clinging with hollow hope to the last scraps of determination in the way he holds himself a bit straighter before turning to look at me. “And I was wrong. I was angry and hurt and that’s no excuse but... when I said I couldn’t forgive you, what I meant was that I can’t forgive you right now. It’s gonna take time.”

I try to laugh, just to fill the empty space. It comes out like a dying man’s last gasp for air. “Which is the one thing we ain’t got.”

Marco frowns. “I know that.”

He knows that. I know that. We’ve both always knows that time was the one luxury that all the crooked cash in the world could never make us able to afford, time-bomb hearts ticking in our chests until the explosion tore us to pieces and left a crater a mile wide in our wake. It was easy to ignore in the beginning, lost in the rush of what we thought was freedom. The short time where we could pretend to be invincible was the prettiest white lie we ever told to each other and ourselves. It’s a little harder now, when we’re both trying to function with bloody messes that are still struggling to beat. In the fallout, the only thing we’ve got left is hindsight.

“I should’ve told you.” This is what I have now. This is what feels solid. I might not be able to mend my mistakes, but I can account for them, see the places where I slipped through the cracks. It won’t fix anything, but letting go of that guilt is so much scarier than holding it close. If I lose it, then what will I have left? I look over at Marco, and I can feel the empty place in me that he claimed for his own ache for him. The only thing to fill in that loss is an endless list of missed chances and bygone opportunities, fingers tracing the edges of the bloodstains like a sinner’s might move over a rosary, my could-have-beens the only prayer I can remember. “I should’ve told you right from the beginning, I should’ve...”

“We both should’ve done a lotta things,” says Marco. It’s not absolution, but it’s not a condemnation either. He shakes his head, leaning forward to pull my hand away from the darkened floorboards. The brush of his fingers over my knuckles is tentative, but gentle. It’s the first time he’s touched me since Chicago. “But we can’t afford to look back right now. We ain’t got the time or energy to spare.”

Easy for him to say. Looking forward is all he’s ever done, fighting off everything that tried to hold him back. I’ve never been strong enough to shake off those ghosts, and they made me so heavy that somewhere along the line, I couldn’t take another step. Marco carried me for a while, until the leaden weight of me broke him too. And now we’re both here, wrecked in the middle of the road, and he talks as if getting up and walking onward is something we could do by force of will alone.

Maybe you, sweetheart, but not me. The ground beneath my feet has always been quicksand, and I’m already neck-deep. There’s no clawing my way back, and I’ve never wanted to drag you down.

“It’s hard not to look back when you know that you ruined everything you ever wanted,” I shrug, feeling the warmth where his skin touches mine and wondering how long I’ve got before the cold sets in again.

“Christ, why do you always do that?” he asks.

“Do what?”

“That thing you do where you try so damned hard to take the blame for every single thing that goes wrong in the world.” Rather than pulling back, Marco’s hand tightens around mine, driving the point home with a steady squeeze. “You’re not the only person who’s ever fucked up, Jean. You’re not the first, and you sure as hell won’t be the last.”

“But I—”

“You did something wrong. It happened. Letting it eat you alive and drowning in your own regret won’t change it. Trust me.”

He would know. I’ve seen firsthand the price that Marco drowning in his own regret demanded, how five long months of scars and shaking hands left him changed. I might not have a missing eye or burn-warped skin to show for my struggles, but I understand the way that the dark things inside of you can corrode, eating away at everything you are until you’re left with nothing but raw wounds and questions you’ll never be able to answer.

“How am I gonna fix this?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” he says.

“Are we gonna be okay?”

“I don’t know.”

“And what _do_ you know?!” I snap, voice breaking.

He doesn’t answer for a long time. I've spent so long relying on him for answers that assuming he has them is second nature, but maybe I should have considered that he's like me, and doesn't know anything other than desolation and the feeling of an unwanted ending pulling him down. Marco stares down at our hands, and something like an epiphany crosses his face.

“I know that I love you.” God, it would be so much easier if he didn't sound like he meant it.

I want it to be that simple, the way it used to be. I love him. He loves me. End of story. But everything has grown so twisted and complicated, and the me that loved Marco that simply was a child. Growing up has granted me the heavy knowledge that nothing in the world can be so black and white. Love and hate, like good and bad, aren't a clean-cut binary. There's a little – or a lot – of each in the other. You try to wrap your head around it, and it just gets more muddled until you don't even know what you feel anymore, until you start to doubt what you felt in the first place.

But then there are moments that shine through that confusion like a falling star, things that make you feel like a coward and a fool for ever daring to question something that's become a part of you. There are moments that feel like coming home, a hand to hold in the your loneliest hour and the promise that the love your naïve hands damaged is still worth holding on to.

He knows that he loves me.

“But you can’t forgive me.” I can't blame him for that, but it's hard to reconcile one promise with another.

Now it’s Marco’s turn to lean forward and ghost his fingertips around the rusty-colored stain on the floor, lips pressed into a thin line as he looks down at the inescapable memory of the horror this place has seen, his pain and loss seeped into the wood beneath his feet. Softly, he muses, “I don’t think anyone really forgives. At least, not the way they’re s’posed to. Forgiveness, _real_ forgiveness, it’s forgetting. And people don’t forget.”

People don’t forget, especially not people like us. If we forget everything we’ve been through, the unfairness and the agony and all our terrible mistakes, then we lose our drive. Being able to run as fast and far as we have, as we _need_ to, it takes fuel. We feed on the memories that haunt us, Marco and I, burn them up in our chests and run on the gasoline fumes of everything we regret. It’s not a perfect system. It hurts. It corrodes and stalls out and it’s nowhere fucking _close_ to efficient. But it’s what we’ve got.

If we forget the fight, forget what we’re fighting _for_ , we’re left with nothing. But looking down at the shattered pieces of what we held dear as they carve into our hands and mix with the blood we’ve already spilled on these floorboards isn’t all that much better.

“So where does that leave us?” I ask Marco, taking some small comfort in the fact that some things never change. At the end of the day, it’s him and me and an open space ahead of us, and I’ll always ask him which way we’re going because I’m too much of a coward to put a foot forward myself.

He shrugs. “Understanding, I guess. If we can’t forget, then we can at least try to understand why.”

Understanding is a tricky thing. It’s not as simple as forgiveness, but that’s because forgiveness is a fairy tale, easy to believe in but impossible to find. Understanding is a roulette game of hurting or healing, because even if someone can understand why you hurt them, sometimes the understanding only serves to drive that pain home. _This_ is why I broke your heart. _This_ is why I let you down. _This_ is why I left you when you needed me. _This_ is why I can’t love you like you want me to. Everyone in my life – Mom, Nettie, Mikasa, _Eren_ – they all understand why I did what I did. Understanding doesn’t make them any less broken.

My mother’s retreated so far into her own head that no one can reach her. Whatever my sister feels for me is probably no better than one small step above hatred. Mikasa will spend the rest of her life with the stain of my name following her around like a scarlet letter. Eren will heal, with time and distance and Michael’s help, but I’ll always be a scar on his soul that hurts from time to time.

Everyone who’s ever understood me has ended up worse off because of it. My justifications are there, pulling at my tongue, but I hold them back until my throat aches from the effort. I’ve hurt Marco enough without burdening him with the understanding of why everything we have is falling down around us.

But he sits there and watches me like I’m made of glass, like he can see all that conflict tying me in knots, and he keeps holding my hand in a silent promise to untangle it if I’ll just let him.

“I’m not like you,” I choke out, curling in on myself again. “I can’t just drop things and walk away from them and move on. And those months when you were in Eastham, I...”

Every part of me hurts under the onslaught of those memories, the days spent with a painted-on smile and nights where I couldn’t get drunk enough to get him out of my head. I could never let him go, even if I had wanted to. Marco had a hold on me from the start, and remembering what it felt like to lose him the first time only makes the last time hit harder, pulling a sob up out of my throat that I hate myself for letting him hear.

“I felt like I was gettin’ ripped apart. Every second of every day, for five months. I couldn’t just walk away from my life and my family, and I couldn’t let you go, and being stuck in-between was _ripping me apart,_ Marco. Between knowing that you were trying to talk to me and knowing that I had a life lined up with Mikasa and what I wanted and what everyone else wanted for me... I couldn’t choose. So I chose neither. I kept the letters, but I didn’t open them. When you’re stuck in that kinda fucked-up tug-of-war, middle ground’s the best you can hope for.”

When you spend your whole life walking on top of fences so you don’t have to choose a side, it becomes a reflex. You don’t think about the mechanics of choosing neither, because if you take the time to dwell on it, your feet will falter and you’ll come crashing down on one choice or the other. You work so hard to obtain the illusion of neutrality that it blinds you to the truth: choosing neither can never end well. The endgame is always both sides going up in flames, destroyed, leaving you standing in the middle of ruination if you’re lucky enough to make it out yourself. When you choose neither, people always get hurt.

He always gets hurt.

“And then I came down there and I saw you and realized what was happening, and I knew how bad I’d messed up.” Somewhere in the death grip of my own shortcomings, I’ve started shaking, knees drawn up to my chest and vision blurred by the hot sharpness of unshed tears. “I let you go through that, because I wasn’t strong enough to make a choice. So I kept the letters to remind myself how dangerous that is. To remind me that I can’t be weak like that again, because it’s got a price.”

The price is Marco. The price of my mistakes has always been Marco, and he’s got the scars and nightmares to show just how much I fuck up. If I still believed in anything enough to lay blame on it, I would rage against God or fate or the powers that turn the universe for being so cruel. I could have handled all of this if I was the one handling my own consequences. I could have a little bit of goddamn peace if _I_ was the one who rotted in jail for months, if _I_ was the one with a missing eye and sixty-two scars.

But that wasn’t the hand we were dealt. What we got was Marco being some karmic whipping boy for all my fuck-ups and me finding other ways to punish myself when the rest of the world wouldn’t. What we got was the delusion that we could stop running and the rude awakening of everything we were running from catching up to us. What we got was the threat of everything we had turning to ash, and what we have now is a fragile hope at best, hands that know each other like another aspect of themselves clenched tight around the last little bit of good we’ve got left.

Marco sucks in a deep breath, closing his eye. When he looks at me again, he doesn’t seem any less broken, but there’s a steadiness to him that wasn’t there before. “I understand.”

It’s not forgiveness, but it’s close enough to it that I feel something wound tight in the pit of my stomach relax.

Marco’s fingers disentangle themselves from mine and pull back, digging into the inside of his vest and pulling out the sealed letters, neatly stacked, in chronological order. I taste something bitter on the back of my tongue. But there’s none of the wild, untamed anger from yesterday when he looks at them, only a weighted melancholy pulling down at his shoulders as he flips back through the paper evidence of all those months we lived (if you can call it that) without each other.

He stops on the last one, brushing his thumb across the bold indents the pen made in the paper, and sighs. “And I was mad because I looked at these letters, and I thought you _had_ made a choice. I thought you didn’t care, that you made the choice to leave me there, that you kept ‘em with you ‘cause you felt guilty after you saw what happened.”

“I was guilty,” I tell him. “I am.”

“But not for the reason I thought.” Shaking his head, he sits the letters aside and reaches up to press his hand against my cheek, warm and rough and so familiar that the presence of it threatens to make me break down all over again. It’s too easy, falling back into him. It’s too easy to hang on his every word like it’s my last hope. “You don’t need to feel guilty because you had a moment where you weren’t strong, darlin’. We’ve all got weaknesses, and they all have consequences. That’s just how it works.”

I’ve always been weak. That was never something I had any trouble coming to terms with. The consequences were harder. I was a fortunate fool, growing up with the idea in my head that my weakness would never have a cost, and waking up to the ugly truth again and again almost destroyed me and everything I love. Maybe it has. Maybe this, what Marco and I have in this moment, is just the calm at the end of all things.

Marco breathes out a bitter laugh and sits back, watching the sunset paint the sky a muted orange through a hole in the barn’s roof. “God knows I’ve got my share of weaknesses.”

“You don’t—“

“I do,” he says, arms winding around himself as he stares at the bloodstained floor again. “And one of ‘em is lying to you about it. I’ve got this warped part of my head that thinks that something ain’t real if I don’t talk about it, and so I let things lie. I let things fester, and grow, and they get so big I can’t fight ‘em anymore, and I...”

He trails off, unspoken confessions hanging in the air like dust motes after a windstorm. Marco’s never been one to mince words, but now it’s like he’s grappling with every one, dragging them kicking and screaming up out of his chest, struggling so fiercely that they scrape his throat raw in an effort to crawl back down.

“I lost something,” he whispers, “that day. It was like all the good in me got ripped out, and now... Now I’ve just got anger and fear and hurt and the part of me that loves you. And that’s it. I don’t even know what I am anymore, but I ain’t me. And I lied to you and pretended to be fine, ‘cause I...”

“’Cause you what?”

“’Cause I didn’t want you to be afraid of me.”

My heart breaks into even more pieces, throwing itself in a bruising throb against my ribs at how fucking _honestly_ he says it, like he earnestly believes that it could happen. Marco’s breath hitches, and he’s so lost that he reaches over and grabs for my hand again, using someone who’s sinking just as much as he is for an anchor. I don’t even have time to dwell on the romanticized tragedy of us both going down together, too busy resolving to mend the broken thing that clings to me like he’s afraid I’ll run if he doesn’t, voice cracking on every word. “You’re all I got left. I don’t even have myself anymore, but I got you, and I can’t lose you, so I lied, ‘cause I was scared you’d walk away if you saw.”

“Why do you always do that?” I ask.

“Do what?”

“That thing you do where you act like you’re the only person who’s got demons,” I murmur, pushing the stray locks of hair back from his face before leaning forward to rest my forehead against his. “I’ve got some of my own. And I’ve seen yours. And I love you.”

He shakes his head, not blinking fast enough to hide the glassy sheen across his eye. “You haven’t—”

“You’re not as good at hiding things as you think, baby.”

I was awake when he cried and trembled so hard that the bed shook with him in the dark. I watched him fracture and bleed out on the mattress every night and stitch himself back together worse than before every morning. Through every bad day and worse night, I stayed, but I got so lost in my own mistakes that I forgot about the war Marco was fighting with the horrors he’d seen. I was selfish in my guilt, and I’m selfish in it now, wondering too late what I could have done to change things. We both could’ve done better and saved more of each other if things had been different, but now the only option we have is trying to pick up the pieces.

And I’ll try. God, I’ll try with my last breath to save what’s left of him.

“I just...” Marco reaches out for something I can’t see, his hands framing thin air as he tilts his head, listening for something that makes no sound. When he doesn’t hear it, he slumps back against the wall, staring at his empty palms and looking so _hollow_ that I’m surprised he doesn’t echo when he speaks again. “I thought that the part of me you loved was gone.”

There’s never been a part of Marco that I loved more than everything he was. Trying to take him and split him into aspects might as well be trying to portion my own soul into sections; differentiating between things I don’t even know how to define anymore. I have loved him, laugher and bright eyes and long kisses, demons and secrets and scars. I have loved him so much that for a few short, blissful moments in time, I’ve forgotten about hating myself. And even now, when he’s so far from himself and I’m so far from who I want to be, I love him. Me loving him has never been something that required a second thought, the last simple truth I have to my name.

“I love all of you.” I can’t promise him anything else in this mad world, but I can promise him that.

“And now that you know?” he asks, still apprehensive.

“I’m not afraid of you, if that’s what you’re askin’.” Careful not to overstep my bounds, I take one of Marco’s hands in both of mine, writing out reassurances with careful fingertips across his skin. “I could never be afraid of you.”

He’s lost and sad and broken, but he kisses me the same way he always has. I can’t even regret the way I cling to him, silently begging any force that will listen not to take him away from me. It’s stupid, really, that I think of Louisiana again at a time like this, the ocean roaring in my ears and Marco promising me that his love would be the last thing standing, even in the wreckage of everything else we had. It’s stupid that in the middle of falling back into him, I’m feeling guilty for ever doubting it.

I can’t do that anymore. There are lots of things we can’t afford to have if we’re going to make it out alive, and the chief among them is doubt.

When we part, we’re both breathing like we’ve run for miles, shaking hands pressed to heartbeats and a distance that only lasts for a moment before I fling my arms around him and hold him close enough that our breaths fall into sync and for just a moment, I don’t feel something eating away at me. Marco exhales heavily into the crook of my neck, a finality to the way he presses a kiss there and says, “We’re both ten kinds of fucked-up, Jean. We’ve got a lotta shit to work through once we get across the border, but we’ll have time to work through it then.”

Frowning, I pull back to ask him what that’s supposed to mean, but he’s moving before I get the chance. Scooping the letters up from the floor beside him, he gets to his feet and walks across the barn, grabbing a rusted bucket from one of the empty stalls to bring back with him. Once he sits back down, he tosses the pile of letters into the bucket, digging through his breast pocket and coming up with a book of matches.

“Marco…” I start, but it’s like he doesn’t even hear me, his focus completely devoted to striking the match on his thumbnail and letting it fall down into the bucket, igniting the letters with a muffled _whoosh._ And just like that, all of his suffering and my mistakes, it all burns up.

I’ll never even know what they all said.

Marco leans over and cradles my face in his hands, gentle, almost reverent, and he says, “What I’ve got with you’s worth more than all the cash and the blood and the stories, and it’s sure as hell worth more than all of our mistakes. I’ll try to save this if you will.”

I will. Even if I never manage to do anything else with the life I’ve made for myself, I’ll save us. We’re the only thing left worth saving.

Trying and failing to blink back the tears, I nod, bringing a hand up to rest over his. “What about now?”

“Now, I need to love you. And I need you to love me.” He says it as simply as he might mention that he needs to breathe. And maybe understanding me is the kiss of doom for most people, but right now it feels like comfort, that we both know exactly how it feels to be stranded in the middle of disaster. We both need to love each other.

Marco settles back down beside me and asks, “Think you can do that?”

That’s never even been a question. “Always.”

“Yeah,” he says, watching the smoke from the letters rising up through the hole in the roof and into the twilight. “Me too.”

* * *

“Are you sure you don’t wanna see your folks?” Eren asks in the morning, gathering up our dishes from breakfast and putting them in the sink. He keeps talking over the rush of water on porcelain, turning over his shoulder to watch me drumming my fingers on the tabletop. “If you wanted to, I could go pick up your mom, bring her over here.”

I swallow the lump in my throat and shake my head. A second chance with Marco was a one-in-a-million shot, and there are some things in life that you just can’t fix. “What would I say to her at this point? What would she say to me?”

Eren shrugs, waving at Connie and Sasha as they head out to the barn to load up the car. “Fair enough. Y’all probably need to hit the road anyway.”

There’s something wrong with how casual this all feels. I’m headed off to start a new life in Mexico, and Eren will be here, spending years cleaning up my messes and taking care of my family. I know him better than to think he’d be bitter about it, but for him to stand there and do the dishes and talk like he’s bullshitting about the weather just doesn’t fit.

It takes a second for me to see how tight his shoulders are, how every movement looks rehearsed and polished. He’s trying to hold it together. He’s so much better at it than I am that I almost missed it.

“Thank you, Eren,” I tell him, reaching over and turning off the tap so he’ll actually turn around and look me in the eye. I’m not so broken that I don’t remember what’s important, and I won’t leave without Eren knowing that he falls into that category. “Thank you for everything. I… I know that it’s been hard. I just wanted you to know that I’m sorry, and I’m grateful. You’re about ten times more than any of us deserve.”

“Stop talkin’ like you’re gonna say goodbye, dumbass,” he huffs, answering with a light punch to my arm. “Mick says that once y’all are settled in, we can come visit. This time next year we’ll both be drinkin’ rum outta coconuts or whatever the fuck it is that folks do on a beach in Mexico, and it’ll be like none of this ever happened.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“I usually am.” A beat in time passes, and then he drops the plate he’s holding into the sink with a splash, turning around and pulling me into a hug so tight it crushes the air out of my lungs. “Take care, Jean.”

I tell myself that this isn’t goodbye, but God, it feels like it, an air of finality so horribly thick clinging to the way I step back, giving Eren’s shoulder a parting squeeze. “You too.”

I hope he does well for himself. Just because I could never do right by him doesn’t mean it isn’t what he deserves.

“And I mean it when I say keep your head down and stay quiet,” says Michael, ushering Marco into the kitchen with an arm slung around him, pulling another envelope out of his suit pocket to pass to him. “I know how you get. If the itch appears, don’t scratch, ‘cause I can’t bail you out of another nationwide manhunt. I’m gettin’ too old for this shit.”

Marco nods, pulling his newsboy cap on a little tighter. “I think I’ve had enough adventure to last me a lifetime. Quiet sounds good. Quiet sounds real good.”

“Who are you and what have you done with Marco Bodt?”

“I don’t rightly know, to tell you the truth,” he says, but the joking tone of it doesn’t quite reach his eyes.

Mick catches it about the same time as I do, puts both hands on Marco’s shoulders and pulls him back enough to get a good hard look at him. “Please be careful, Marco. You know what to do, so just please don’t get yourself killed in the process of doin’ it.”

“I’ll try my best,” says Marco. His smile almost looks real.

Michael curses under his breath and pulls his brother into a brief, tight hug, a careful mask of composure when he steps back. “Love you, kid.”

A long silence passes between them, weighted with something they understand, but I don’t. Finally, Marco sticks out his hand. “Stay outta trouble if you can…”

“Stay outta jail if you can’t,” Michael finishes, grabbing Marco’s hand and giving it a quick squeeze. It holds the same ending feeling as my conversation with Eren, a not-goodbye that feels a hell of a lot like a final farewell. But maybe I’m overthinking it.

At least, that’s what I’m able to tell myself until I get ready to leave.

Michael Bodt has never had two words that weren’t an insult to say to me, but after Marco heads out towards the barn and I go to follow, he grabs my arm, holding me back until I turn around and look at him. Every ounce of bravado and pretention is gone, leaving him looking sallow and scared. There’s no mocking bite to his voice when he looks from Marco’s retreating back to my confused face and whispers, “Drive fast. For the love of God, drive fast.”

And the look on his face mixed with the apprehension I now know I’m not alone in feeling makes me so damned uneasy, I do.

We burn rubber down the back roads and through dusty roundabouts until Marco nods toward the access to the main road through Dallas and says, “Turn this way.”

“Why are we headed downtown?” I do as he asks, but something prickles at the back of my neck as soon as buildings and people and traffic start to surround us.

“There’s something I’ve gotta do.”

Connie puts two and two together before I do, sitting bolt up right in the back seat with an expression of outright horror. “Oh, fuck me sideways with a rake. Marco, _no._ ”

“Shut up, Connie.”

“I know you said one more job before we leave the states, but this is the _definition_ of tempting fate, brother; are you outta your natural mind?”

“Gonna tell you to shut up one more time, Connie.”

And that’s when I get it. Marco only gets more tense the further we get into town, and by the time the intricate architecture of Dallas National Bank breaks the skyline, his fists are clenched so tightly in his lap that his hands go white.

“Baby, you always said that the first rule was never hit the same place twice,” I remind him, and for a first attempt it feels a lot like a last-ditch effort. “And we don’t know what it’s like in there. There could be new alarms, security officers…”

“I have to do this,” he says, reaching under the seat for his gun. “If I can close the book, if I can end it here, maybe…”

And God, I wish he wouldn’t do this, his spine bowing a little bit as he looks down at the revolver clutched in his hand and whispers, “Maybe that’ll make it better.”

Marco has suffered. We all have, but he’s been the one catching the brunt of the backlash from day one, prison bars and blood and nightmares and heartache. We’re both breaking, but he wants to save this. He wants to save us, and he can’t do that if he falls apart before he ever gets the chance. I can see why he wants the closure. I can understand.

But understanding is a tricky thing.

“If you’re gonna do this, I’m coming with you,” I say, parking the car in front of the bank.

Marco’s shaking his head before he even looks up. “These ain’t your demons to fight, Jean.”

“No. Don’t push me out. We’re not doin’ this anymore,” I hiss, grabbing his hand to stop him from reaching for the door. He turns around to reply, and I cut him off, not leaving any room for arguments. Even if I can’t put him back together by myself, I won’t sit by as he struggles. “We’re not doin’ this thing where we try to fight alone, ‘cause we’ve seen how it works out. Never again. We go together or not at all, you hear me?”

“You don’t need to—”

“ _Together or not at all,_ Marco.”

Marco frowns, but he eventually nods his assent, leaning over long enough to give me a quick kiss. “Thank you.”

Reaching over to grab one of the BARs out of the back seat, I give Connie and Sasha a parting nod. “You two make the loop like last time. We’ll be in and out in no time.”

“I’ve got a bad feelin’ about this,” Connie grumbles, hopping out of the back seat.

“You and me both. Just make the loop.” It’s been half a year since that day, but my heart pounds in my ears the same way it did then, loud and insistent, only quelled by the presence of Marco’s hand in mine as we jump out of the car. “C’mon, sweetheart. Let’s go end it.”

“Together or not at all,” he whispers.

I kick the door open and fire a spray of bullets into the ceiling, and there’s no turning back.

Together or not at all.

“Good afternoon, Dallas! Hands up!”

It’s a mixed reaction this time. Mostly screams, but a few intrigued murmurs and even one _“Oh, you’ve gotta be kiddin’ me.”_ We’re a conversation topic if not old news to these people. I don’t have enough pride left to be wounded by that, only concerned insofar as making sure that no one gets any stupid ideas. And Marco…

Marco looks alive for the first time in months.

“Man, I just love this place. Had to come back for another visit,” he says, prowling down the row of teller stations with the Cheshire Cat grin I’d almost forgotten. He’s always been the most at ease with a gun in his hand, but this is something different, something cathartic in the fact that he’s standing in front of the replaced plate glass window with all the power in this situation resting in his hands. He twirls the gun idly around his finger by the trigger guard, clicking the safety on and off like he’s playing with a toy. “At any rate, y’all should know the drill by now. Patrons over against that wall - away from the window, if you please; I’m reasonably skittish - and tellers at your stations ‘til I say so. Everyone listens and complies; this’ll be done in no time. I got no desire to stay in this shithole any more than you fine folks want me here. Pardon my French, ladies.”

“Hands all the way up if you don’t mind, everyone,” I chime in, shooting him a worried glance. “We don’t want any complications.”

He’s being too sloppy. Confidence is one thing, but hubris is another game entirely, and with every second that Marco’s smirk grows wider and his movements grow more bold, I can feel something uneasy clamping down on my chest. We need to finish this. We need to grab some money and let Marco get his closure and get the fuck away from Dallas before its tried-and-true death trap comes closing in on us again.

“I remember you,” Marco grins at the pretty teller standing at the first station. “You were here last time.”

She nods, already popping her till open to get a handful of cash. “Yes, sir, I was.”

“Wasn’t you the one who asked for an autograph?”

“I believe I was.”

“I thought so. But you never know. My memory of that day’s a little fuzzy, what with the plate glass window hittin’ me in the face,” he laughs, a dark, unhinged inflection to it that paints the words with a dangerous edge. “You got a pen, sugar?”

“Marco, is this really the time?” I snap, scanning the faces of the patrons, hyper-aware of everyone’s smallest movements.

Marco shrugs, signing a fifty-dollar bill with a flourish before waving it at me. “Last time we’ll ever get the chance, darlin’. You should come over here and sign this too. This young lady could have quite the collectible on her hands.”

“We need to get the money and go.”

“It ain’t about the money. If we’re gonna go out, might as well go out with style.”

“Might as well.”

After the voice pipes up from the other side of the lobby, things happen too fast to process. Someone screams. I whip around, committing the cardinal sin of bank robbery by turning my back on the patrons. Marco’s autographed fifty falls to the floor like autumn’s last leaf, and its silence is followed immediately by the _roar_ of everyone clamoring over each other to get out, tellers and patrons shoving each other through the door and pouring out onto the street.

The lobby is cavernous in their absence, and Levi Ackerman watches us down the sights of his handgun, his sharp Bostonian drawl bouncing off the marble walls. “It’s over, boys. How it ends is in your hands, but it’s over.”

None of us move, but a terrifying change comes over Marco, something going dead in his eye. He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t turn from where he’s got his gun hand resting on the counter, but something so malicious comes off of him in waves that it sends a chill down my spine.

“Ain’t you s’posed to be in Chicago?” I ask, finding it a little odd that even though I’ve got an automatic rifle trained on him, Ackerman’s still pointing his weapon at Marco. It doesn’t make sense until it does, settling in my stomach like a boulder.

The price of my mistakes has always been Marco.

“I told Erwin he was an idiot for leaving me down here,” Ackerman shrugs, very at-ease for being in the middle of a showdown, leaning against the counter and fishing for a cigarette with his free hand. “Turns out I owe him an apology. And five dollars. Either of you boys got a light?”

“Last time we met, you told me that you didn’t want this to end bloody.” I try to keep the statement from wavering, and it almost works, only a slight hitch on the last few syllables. “We walk outta here now, and it won’t.”

Marco doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t move.

“What fantasy land are you living in?” The rebuke is harsh, doubling back on itself with the lobby’s echoes, and Levi Ackerman looks at me with something worse than hatred. I’ve never wanted anyone’s pity, especially not his. “This got bloody a long damn time ago. The cop in Missouri, the armory in Enid, all those good men you killed in Joplin. Hell, this _lobby_ has had blood on the tile before because of you. This mess is completely soaked with blood. And now it’s done. Put the gun down, son. Let it end.”

I swallow hard, shaking my head and clicking the safety on the BAR off. “You know I can’t do that.”

“I told you the last time we talked that it was gonna end up this way, kid.”

“And I told you that I know what I’m doing.”

“No you don’t, because you’re nineteen goddamn years old!” He shouts, and there’s something more raw to it than just another lawman talking down to just another delinquent. I hadn’t noticed back in the diner how young he is, twenty-five at most, slight of build in the way of someone who grew up hungry, eyes hard and blue as slate faltering as his accusations skirt a little too close to home. “You’re just a kid, and you’re scared. Because this isn’t what you signed up for. People dying, people getting hurt, you never signed up for any of that.”

It’s the first time someone’s called me on it. I made a promise almost a year ago, clinging to Marco in front of Annie’s door on New Year’s Eve and swearing that I wasn’t going to be scared anymore. I told myself I wasn’t.

But I am. _God,_ I’ve been scared. Scared of dying, scared of losing what I had left, scared of what I was becoming in the name of a love that’s always been too big for me. It hits me like a locomotive, that year’s worth of fear crawling up into my throat. I have to clench my teeth to keep from screaming.

Ackerman sees it, though, trying one last time to talk me off the edge. “I’ve been where you are, Jean. Lost, scared, in over my head. I was lucky. I had someone who cared about me enough to get me out before I landed myself in prison or worse. But you? You pull that trigger, there’s no going back.”

There’s never been any going back, and there isn’t now. That’s not what this is about. This is a question of what I’m willing to do, a question of who I’m willing to become. It’s about what I am at my core, standing here with the means in my hand to take a life.

“Is this who you are, Jean?” he asks, stoic as a stone, like he knows an answer that not even I know. “Is this who you want to be?”

I don’t know.

There are two people I could be, two choices I can make. I could blow him to smithereens right now, take Marco and run, get to Mexico and seal the last two years of my life in stone. Or I could put the gun down, go nice and quiet, and it would all be over. I could pull the trigger and end up like Marco, fractured and warped by the lives I’ve taken, or I could take everything we have, everything we’re trying to save, and give it up.

I don’t want either of those options, because I’m not brave enough to choose. So I forget the fact that it’s bound to come with a price, take the coward’s way out and choose neither.

The BAR kicks hard against my shoulder, and Levi Ackerman’s knee explodes in a spray of blood and bone. He goes down screaming, and I dart forward long enough to kick his gun across the floor before turning to grab Marco and run like the Devil himself is on our heels.

He’s still silent, yanking his arm away when I go to grab it. I stop mid-step, staring at him. “C’mon, let’s go.”

Marco doesn’t say a word, his gun arm falling loosely at his side as he takes a step away from the counter in the wrong direction, ambling over to where Ackerman’s blood is spreading across the marble like a crimson flower. The screaming’s faded now, replaced by quiet, pained groans, and Marco just stands there and watches with mild interest, his head tilting to the side.

“Marco. We need to go.” Nothing. I might as well not exist. He’s gone somewhere I can’t reach, held captive by those dark things in his head that he tried to hide from me. A moment passes, and he tilts his head again, walking in a slow circle with no heed to the bloody footprints he leaves on the floor in his wake.

I risk taking a few steps closer, ducking into his field of view and trying to keep the hysterical hitch in my throat from betraying me, as calm as I can pretend to be. “Hey, look at me. Leave him. Let’s just get outta here.”

He looks _empty,_ dead-eyed and limp-limbed as he moves around Ackerman’s fallen body in a tighter circle, an odd, childlike curiosity that plays out in the way his finger strokes along the Colt’s trigger guard. Contemplative. Dangerous.

“Marco, please.” No more games. I’m pleading now, fighting back the terror rising like bitter ice in the back of my throat.

Marco looks up at me. Blinks. Looks back down.

And with a movement as sharp and calculated as a military drill, he empties the revolver’s whole cylinder into Levi Ackerman’s head.

The gunfire cracks and accosts my ears like thunder, faster than the realization of what’s happened, overloading my senses and addling my brain. I process it in pieces. My ears ringing. Something pink-red and viscous spattered across my clothes. Little flecks of shattered white sticking to my shoes. Teeth.

I only make the mistake of looking at what’s left of Levi Ackerman’s face for about half a second before I gag and turn away fighting to keep from throwing up as Marco stands next to the corpse he created with a smoking gun in his hand, detached, watching the blood spread out like the tide coming in.

“D’you see the way his head bounced?” he muses, the words ringing hollow. “Like a rubber ball.”

And then slowly – lazy, not a care in the world – he bends over and steals the monogrammed handkerchief out of Levi Ackerman’s pocket to wipe his brains off his shoes.

“W-we… we need to go. We need to go,” I wheeze, grabbing Marco by the arm and _hauling_ him out of the bank, away from the stench of blood and death. Connie and Sasha are nowhere to be found. Probably still rounding the block. In the distance, I hear sirens. No time.

I feel like my guts are turning somersaults, but I slam it down with all the force I’ve got in me, survival instinct taking over and telling me that grave robbing isn’t nearly as bad as being an accomplice to murder, and I’ve already got that under my belt. Precious seconds pass as I turn around and sprint back into the bank, shoving my hand into Ackerman’s blood-soaked suit pocket and coming up with a set of keys that I run right back out with, trying in vain to rub the sticky red off my hands.

It’s the same car he drove up to the bank the last time we were here. Model V8, mint condition, the inside meticulously clean.

I smear blood on the steering wheel when I turn the engine over and go screaming out into the street.

There’s nothing but silence for the first few minutes, my ragged breaths and occasional gagging when I look down at the blood beneath my nails and remember what I just saw. Marco sits and looks out the window, chin perched in his hand.

“It didn’t help,” he says after a minute, soft, slightly disappointed. “I thought it would help, but it didn’t.”

I promised Marco that I could never be afraid of him. But whatever I just watched kill somoene in cold blood, whatever’s sitting next to me in a dead man’s car with a dead man’s life staining his shirt without so much as a flinch, it isn’t Marco.

I drive out of Dallas with the pedal to the floor.

And I am terrified.


	27. Marco

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Surprise!!! I come back from my sabbatical bearing gifts! Gifts of PAIN.
> 
> This chapter's companion soundtrack can be found [here.](http://8tracks.com/southspinner/chapter-twenty-seven-marco)
> 
> I have a [tumblr.](http://southspinner.tumblr.com)
> 
> Enjoy, kids!

Shutting down has become such a familiar thing it almost feels like comfort.

There’s the strangest disconnect, a line between the world and me that keeps me cut off, cauterized, calm in the face of what I know should be horror. For all of Jean’s panicked backward glances and occasional gagging, I can’t seem to do anything but stare out the window, hands knotted in my lap, fingers slipping through each other with the warm slickness of blood.

After the first death, back in Missouri a million years ago, I used to dream of it coating my hands and wake up screaming. It’s easier, wide-awake with the real thing staining my skin.

I haven’t known peace like this since back before everything fell apart. If I’d have known that there would be this much solidity in every scrap of hope I might have had being gone forever, I would have thrown it all away long before now.

They say that the world will end in fire and fury and damnation, but that’s not true for me. My whole existence has been fire and fury and damnation. The end of it all is quiet and cold, watching the last light fade out and feeling nothing because there’s nothing left to feel.

Jean is reeling. I know this, because it filters through my senses to the small part of my brain that still clings, stubborn and masochistic, to reality. His whole body trembles in the driver’s seat, tears blazing clean tracks across his dirty cheeks with little hiccupped half-sobs that he can’t completely swallow. He’s feeling everything that should be ripping me apart, and I’m too far from myself to do anything but notice it. The countryside blurs outside the window, falls into a distant rhythm with the rush of dusty earth beneath the tires and the sound of Jean’s ragged, gasping attempts at breathing.

“We lost Connie and Sasha,” he wheezes after a few more minutes, eyes darting between the rearview and the road. “They don’t know where to go. They’re running blind. Jesus Christ, we’ve as good as handed ‘em over.”

He doesn’t speak of anything else, of how I’ve taken our last chance and shot it down in the middle of the Dallas National Bank lobby. He doesn’t need to. Somewhere in me, a place that’s separated and closed-off from the rest, already knows. And the worst part about it isn’t the blood on my hands, or even the way that Jean can’t look at me without breaking down.

What’s terrifying, what would scare me senseless if I had anything left in me that would let me be scared, is how _easy_ it was.

The cop in Missouri kept me up for months. The bodies in Joplin lurked in the back of my conscience, a question of how many I’d killed that I’d never be able to answer. The guard on the train to Dallas made me realize just how much of myself I’d lost. But killing Levi Ackerman felt like even less than swatting a fly, a simple, clean-cut knowledge soaked in a scarlet mess that can never be cleaned up. We’re alive. He’s dead.

All I’m able to process is simple truths like those, but another long stretch of silence gives Jean’s words time to sink in, my mouth forming a response without my mind to guide it. “Head south.”

His eyes widen, grip going white-knuckled on the steering wheel. “The hell I will! We’ve gotta get outta Texas and ditch this car before—”

“Jean.” He still won’t look at me, but at least he’ll listen. “Head south.”

“This whole thing’s gone to hell, Connie and Sasha are gone, and you wanna stick around?” he asks, taking the next turn and setting us on an even more remote path, winding through miles of foreclosed farmhouses and empty fields.

“Connie and I planned for somethin’ like this. There’s a meet-up point. We agreed years ago that if we ever got separated, we’d head there. Three days pass and the other one doesn’t show up, we move on.”

It’s the definition of last-ditch, but it’s better than consigning Connie and Sasha to the consequences of my actions without at least an attempt. I still can’t feel, not really, but the longer we drive down the road that starts to look more familiar with every mile, the more present the heavy cold that settles in my gut becomes, a sense of foreboding that fits in with the survival instinct I’ve been running on since we left Dallas.

We pass a creek that I remember. The scarred skin on my back tingles. Jean follows the muttered directions I give him, his driving becoming progressively unsteadier.

“I can’t… God, my hands…” Pulling off to the side of the road, he stops the car, the setting sun painting a golden hue across his bloodstained palms as he pulls them, shaking, off the steering wheel. It’s more reflexive than anything else, the way I automatically reach over to Jean, trying to give him some kind of steadiness. But there’s nothing familiar in how he _recoils_ from the motion, a violent jerk of his whole body that flattens him against the opposite side of the car. _“Don’t.”_

For the first time in hours, something cuts through my numb haze to the point that I feel something other than impulse or muted would-be emotions. And it hurts. It strikes too fast for me to stop myself from wincing; leaning back in my seat and watching as Jean pulls himself back together. There was a time when he relied on me to help with that. Now, there’s just the two of us, inches apart with the space feeling like a whole world, lost and broken and not nearly as good at rebuilding ourselves as we always have been with rebuilding each other.

“Don’t,” he says again, softer this time.

So I don’t. I sit there in the passenger seat, and Jean pulls back out onto the road, and we drive. There used to be something close to contentment in that, an amniotic tranquility that came with sitting in a car and watching the world outside go by, loud and violent, something we once thought could never touch us. Somewhere along the way, we lost that peace along with all the rest of the good in us. It’s just driving now, a means to an end, and it seems so _tired,_ the long whine of tires on a dirt road and a stiff silence and the two of us trapped in our own heads.

The sun sinks below the horizon, night falling cool and stale across the dusty emptiness as we keep going, the only time either of us speak when I tell Jean which turns to take. Miles and minutes pass, and when we spot the first pinpricks of light in the distance, I tell him to kill the headlights and keep driving. The lights get closer, along with the outlines of barns and fences and farm equipment silhouetted against the sky. I feel sick.

“This barn on the left up here,” I choke out.

Jean taps on the brakes, turning over to stare at me. The look of confusion is the longest he’s held eye contact with me since Dallas. “This won’t work. It’s not abandoned.”

I know that. Anyone with half a brain would know that, given one look at the surrounding area. The ranch goes on for miles, mended fences sprawling out beyond our line of sight into the dark. There’s a narrow, worn path that leads up to the barn, splitting off in different directions, the land stripped bare where trucks and tractors and horses have made countless trips. There’s another barn farther back the path, the distant glow of light in the farmhouse windows beside it. To the side, across the barren barnyard, two more houses stand out of place in the middle of all the flat nothingness, beacons of what should feel like warmth but instead spreads out like frostbite along the lining of my lungs. I’ve spent so long running. The fact that I’m willing to stop for Connie and Sasha’s sake is a testament to the fact that maybe there might be a scrap of decency left in me.

Jean’s always been better at self-sacrifice than me. But I can try. I can _try._

I swallow hard, nodding at an almost-invisible cow path around the barn that will keep up out of sight from the houses. “You can pull in. No one ever goes in that barn. Nothin’ in there but old farm equipment and junk.”

“How the hell would you know that?” Jean snaps, shaking, eyes wide and darting back and forth. I’ve got nothing but my hopeless calm, but he’s got that animalistic sort of fear in him, blinded by panic, consumed by the hunters behind him and the danger before him.

He doesn’t want to walk willingly into a trap. Neither do I. Especially not one I once had to fight so hard to escape.

“Because it’s my barn,” I tell him, and admitting it catches in my throat, so bitter that I can’t choke it down. “It was, anyway.”

Jean doesn’t have a response to that. I’m not sure if I’d even be able to have the last word if he did. But his shocked silence is too heavy for my tired mind to bear, and so I leave it behind me, hopping out of the passenger side and sliding the barn door open in a tide of dust years undisturbed and memories I’d rather not have.

The inside is cavernous and dark, nightmarish shadows of retired farm machines coming out of the shadows like claws. Mick and Connie and I used to hide among them, turn them into mansions and outlaw’s hideouts in the way that only little boys can. Now, all I can see in them is the warped ribcage of a skeleton long decayed, and if I listen close, I can almost hear the ghosts of the children we once were playing among them.

Jean pulls the car in, cuts the engine and tugs the door shut behind us. The rusty hinges screech, and I can’t claim that they’re alone in their sentiments, standing and watching the stars disappear behind the old wood with all the cold, slow madness of someone being buried alive.

“Are we…” Even his whisper echoes through the rafters, filling the place up with sound it probably hasn’t held in years. “Are we in _Telico_ right now?”

I can’t find my voice to tell him he’s right. Instead, I nod and fold myself down in an empty corner, trying to ignore the way that the glow of the headlights makes the shadows seem to reach for me.

This place can’t have me. I can’t let it wrap around my ankles and tug me back. If I do, it’ll be the end of me. Even if there isn’t much left to save, Telico doesn’t get to claim a goddamn scrap of me. That thought is the deepest, most visceral thing that I can latch onto in my current state, so I hold it as tight as I can, eye screwed shut and forehead pressed to my knees. Breathe in. Breathe out.

I wonder if it’s possible to drown in dust.

The car creaks as Jean leans back against the front bumper, dragging his hands down his face. “This is it. We’re done for.”

Breathe in. Breathe out. After a few more seconds, I overcome my paralysis enough to look back up at him and shake my head. “Connie’ll show up. He always shows up. We’ll head to New Orleans after he and Sasha get here.”

Jean doesn’t have an answer for that. He just stares at me, the shaking of his hands stilling in a moment of hushed disbelief. “How are you so calm right now?”

Because after years of disastrous effort, I’ve finally learned that there’s no use raging against the darkness at the end of the world. But thinking that and saying it are two different things, and Jean’s grown bitter enough without me adding to it. So instead of answering him, I shrug, picking at the dark lines of congealed blood under my fingernails.

A broken, hysterical laugh catching behind clenched teeth, Jean whirls away from the car and starts to pace, leaving footprints in the dust settled thick across the floorboards. He moves like he knows that stillness will destroy him – something he learned from me, a curse he never would have had to bear if I hadn’t pressed it into his willing hands and willing heart. And all the while, through minutes beyond counting, he starts a slow, visible descent towards his breaking point.

Somewhere between him clutching white-knuckled at his own hair and muttering under his breath, I end up on my feet, just as unable to sit stagnant as Jean. I wonder if he even sees me, eyes miles away with a built-up momentum that keeps him going right up until I reach out and brush my fingers over his shoulder. “Darlin’?”

He recoils, just like he did in the car, reels backwards and clutches at his shoulder like my touch burns. I’ve never seen him look at anything we’ve spent so much time outrunning with anything close to the fear in his eyes when he looks at me, shaking his head and swallowing tears. “What _are_ you?”

Darling, I wish I knew.

Every breath rakes through his clenched teeth like a labor he doesn’t want to fight through, words coming out in an accusatory hiss. “Do you realize what this means? Missouri was an accident and Joplin was a bloodbath, but this is cold-blooded _murder_ , Marco! We can’t write this off!”

“I know.”

“I never wanted to be complicit to this! I never signed up to be a murderer!”

“You never killed anyone.” There’s something wrong with how I’ll admit to taking a man’s life for no reason and try to comfort Jean in the same breath, but my priorities – along with everything else – have been muddled for so long that I can’t figure out where the balance between my efforts shifts.

“I never signed up to _love_ a murderer!” Jean must be able to figure it out better than I can. Either that, or he’s finally aware of how little my reassurances are actually worth. I suppose I should be grateful that he’d even acknowledge what we have at a time like this, but it’s hard to find comfort in how he spits that he loves me like it’s a curse. Usually I’m the one who says one thing and does another, but there’s no love in how Jean falls back into his pacing only to round on me, a fist bunching up in my wrinkled shirt. “Was it worth it? You’ve put the last goddamn nail in our coffins; _was it worth it?!_ We can’t run from this! We can’t go back, we can’t—”

“I KNOW.” The shout aches in the base of my throat, a wasted effort to drown out the mixed clamor of Jean and the slowly rising cacophony in my own head. “I know. Just let me think.”

Jean shakes his head again, unwilling to grant me even that. “You shot an unarmed man in the head six times. There’s nothin’ to think about.”

Something in me – something dark and terrible that’s been locked away for far too long – breaks.

 _“Look at me!”_ Blind in the sudden onslaught of fury, the demand coming out in a snarl, I grab him by the arm as he goes to turn away and yank him back, make him face the fallout of broken windows and a shattered soul. “ _Look at what he did to me_ and tell me I wasn’t justified!”

I fell in love with Jean because he had a fire in him, a stubborn bravery that a lifetime fighting through the chokehold of West Dallas couldn’t stifle. For so long, I devoted myself to making sure that light wouldn’t go out in him, to making sure that he’d stay brave and beautiful and _mine_. The world changed. We changed. I shoved down the things that I was too scared to acknowledge until the floodgates broke and they came out in a blaze of blood and gunfire. I broke. And Jean? God, even broken, he’s still brave and still beautiful.

He looks me in the eye, scars and demons and all, and he doesn’t falter. “You weren’t justified. Nothing can justify what I saw today. I promised to love you. Not to lie to you.”

He doesn’t let me down gently, and I almost wish that I could feel it the way I’m supposed to, the betrayal, the frustration, the hurt. But it just feels like resignation. I don’t have the will or the energy anymore to fight for something I’ve already lost.

“I’m not sorry,” I whisper. My last fallback. The only one that’s never failed me.

“I know you’re not,” he laughs, cold and distant. “You never are.”

“It’s not like he wouldn’t have killed us both if he thought it’d suit him.”

My grip on his arm has loosened, breaks easily when Jean shoves me back, eyes scathing. “No! You don’t get to play this fuckin’ game, Marco! You don’t get to go digging for excuses because you don’t want to come to terms with the fact that you’re…”

He trails off, staring at the floor and clenching his jaw like he knows he’s said too much.

“That I’m what?” I ask.

The answer hangs in the air, unspoken but no less true. For a brief moment, the roaring of all my demons throwing themselves around inside my head silences, giving me the chance to look down and really _see_ the blood drying on my hands. And Jean, as stubborn and brave and beautiful as he’s ever been, I see the way he fights back a shudder when he looks at me.

And if this could be the last moment of clarity I get before I’m lost for good, I might as well see the truth for what it is. I might as well see myself once more for what I am.

A monster.

“What have I done? Oh my God, what have I _done_?” Hours late, the impact finally hits home, crushing into my chest with a blow so heavy it feels like my lungs are collapsing inwards, robbing me of anything but shallow, desperate breaths.

I don’t feel guilt. Never did too well with it to begin with, and now, the part of me that might have had a bit of it has long since been torn away. I can’t feel remorse for my actions, but I can feel unbridled _horror_ at their consequences.

We could have had something, Jean and me, after this was all over. Something fractured and dysfunctional and hard to mend, but _something._ Now all we get is the grief-stricken silence of watching every something we ever had a chance at evaporate into nothing.

Because of me.

Jean swallows hard, staring down at his own hands, at the blood he didn’t shed that stains them nonetheless. “Don’t ask me. I’ve done enough wrong that I don’t have any authority to judge you. But the way you _looked_ at him…”

I can already see it happening, how his gaze goes from accusatory to introspective, his body seeming smaller as it curls inwards. He’s already starting with the self-blame, and goddammit, I thought we were past this. He promised.

Jean promised to stop beating himself up over things he couldn’t help. I promised to keep the dark and dangerous parts of me on a leash until we figured out how to tame them. Neither of us has ever been very good at keeping our word. But watching him fight back tears is a tougher battle than most of the ones I’ve faced, because now we both know that there isn’t anything left of me worth crying over. There sure as hell isn’t anything about me that’s worth Jean tearing himself apart.

At his first choked-back sob, my will gives out. I can’t do this. I can’t stand here and watch him punish himself for all the ways he couldn’t save me. I can’t. I can’t.

“I can't.”

So I don’t. I push back the deadly memories of a time where I was his comfort instead of his ruination, and I turn on my heel and walk out of the barn, away from where Jean has taken his place among all my other ghosts.

“Marco, wait—” he starts, but I’m already gone. The way those two seconds play out might as well be the past year of our lives.

The air outside is crisp and cool, a welcome change from the musty, tomblike stillness of the barn. A soft breeze brushes through the dry grass, and the moon and stars overhead are blinding-bright the way they only are in the country, coloring the barnyard in a palette of shadows. I know better than to think that I have any place in the idyllic scene that Telico must paint for those who haven’t suffered here. I don’t want to be a part of it. Nostalgia and I have never gotten along, but that doesn’t stop it from tugging at the corners of my mind, filling in things I wanted to forget.

I see the pasture where I learned to shoot, and with it I see Michael’s jealous scowl and one of a handful of smiles my father ever gave me. The corral where Miles taught me to ride is still standing, the fence posts sagging into disrepair. The cow path that served as the getaway route for all of my boyhood schemes with Connie still winds off towards the horizon and disappears into the dark. Something in my chest tightens.

It was easier, pretending that Telico was nothing but unadulterated hell, that the only thing I ever did here was languish in my wasted potential and plot my escape. The good memories of bad places, those are the dangerous ones. They catch in the places where the heartache is worst and twist and muddle until you’re not sure exactly what it is you’ve lost or won. I threw all my happy memories down in the dirt along with the blood from fresh wounds when I left. I couldn’t afford to keep them.

So this is how it feels when one of the things you’ve spent years running from finally catches up.

There are little undercurrents of sound that cut through the silence of the night – a coyote howling off in the distance, the wind whistling around the corners of buildings. But over all of that, there’s music, muted and interrupted by laughter, pouring out of the house across the barnyard. It sinks into me like hooks beneath my skin, a familiarity I don’t want tugging me forward until I reach down and grab a fence post to stop my own momentum.

“It’s New Year’s Eve,” I mutter, staring straight ahead.

Jean stops beside of me, frowning. “What?”

After Miles got married, he couldn't make it home for Christmas anymore because of the commute from Austin and a mother-in-law who supposedly made Medusa seem charming in comparison. And then the twins got married, and Martin left for college, and Christmas just became harder the more we were all scattered, so we started getting everyone together for New Year's instead. After I left, I never thought about those gatherings again, because they were one of those good memories of bad places that would only have served to tear me apart more than everything else already had. But standing here, shielded from sight by the side of the barn and staring through the glass at a life that used to be mine…

It cuts deeper than it should. Telling yourself that you’re past grieving and actually meaning it are two different things.

I watch it all play out like a disjointed movie behind the gritty glass, little moving snapshots of people I used to love – people who used to love me – as they move past the window, caught up in a life where I might as well not exist. It seems like they’re better without me.

Miles looks _old_ – too old for twenty-seven, a weary stoop to his broad shoulders and patches of gray sneaking into his black hair at the temples – but he smiles, an arm looped around his wife’s waist and two little girls running circles around them. God, they were babies the last time I saw them. The twins, mirror images as ever, stumble past with bottles in hand, leaning on each other to stay upright while their wives trail behind them with matching glares. Martin walks by, still skinny and bespectacled, hand in hand with a woman I’ve never seen before, tall and beautiful and very pregnant. Mick never even mentioned that he’d gotten married.

And I know that I no longer have a place here, I know that I should turn away and spare myself what little I can, but realizing that I’m a glutton for punishment has been a long time coming. My family goes on and laughs and drinks and celebrates the way they’ve probably been doing for the past five years. I ran away from all of this. I packed my bags and bore my bruises with pride and _ran,_ and it’s the cruelest kind of full-circle that all I can do now is stand and watch the show go on, searching desperately for the one face in the window I haven’t seen in so long.

I’m clinging so tightly to the ache in my chest that I don’t even let it go long enough to notice the back door opening, spilling out light around a tall shadow that stumbles out into the yard. “Marco!”

 _“Shit,”_ Jean hisses, hitting the ground and dragging me along with him by the back of my shirt, shuffling through the dead grass back towards the shadow of the barn. “Move, move, move!”

Maybe there’s a kind of justice in this, that it’ll be my own flesh and blood that brings everything to an end, just like it was my own flesh and blood that began it all. Jean presses himself flat against the barn, clamping a hand over his own mouth to silence his ragged breaths, and I just sit there, waiting for everything I feared so much that I made myself leave all possibility of it behind. The anger. The disgust. When I told Michael that it felt easier to be the dead brother he loved than the living one he hated, it wasn’t all bluster.

“Marco! Get back over here!” The shadow’s voice calls out, big, booming – Maddox – but there’s no malice in it, only a hint of halfhearted sternness that’s answered by a shrieking laugh a little farther across the yard. A child. Jean whispers a tide of curses at me as I chance a look around the barn, watching my brother chase after a little boy of about three years old with big eyes and chubby cheeks and scoop him up with one arm, ruffling his hair. “Can't take my eyes off you for two seconds, huh, kiddo? C’mon, your mother’ll whip us both if you get your clothes dirty.”

 _Maddox named his oldest boy Marco,_ Mick had told me, but in my heart of hearts, I hadn’t let myself believe it. Admitting that there were still people who loved me enough to miss me would have only made everything worse.

I sit there, oblivious to Jean’s whispered pleas to come back inside, watching the life and family I left behind. Little Marco gets brought back into the fold to a chorus of muted laughter, handed off to his mother, who kisses his cheek and combs his hair back into place before she sets him free to dart amongst the legs of various aunts and uncles. Everywhere he runs, he’s greeted with a smile. He’s happy. He’s warm. He’s loved.

He’ll be fine, provided he doesn’t fall in love with the wrong person someday.

“I can’t watch this anymore,” I whisper, and God, how far have I fallen to be jealous of a child?

“Where are you going?” Jean calls after me, waiting until I’m a good thirty yards away to give chase. “Hey, what… Marco!”

I have to get away from this. I’m haunted enough by everything I’ve lost without factoring my brothers into the equation, and there aren’t too many feelings worse than being an intruder in your own home. I can’t let those good memories of bad places take hold of me, because if I do, they’ll rip me to shreds. There’s nothing in those ghosts that I can take and use as a weapon. The only things in Telico that ever gave me the will to fight were far more unpleasant, the fear, the anger, the hopelessness. I’m a thousand kinds of fucked-up for heading out into the dark to search for these things.

And it’s ten-thousand kinds of fucked-up that even five years later, I still know where to find them.

The family plot sits a ways off from the big house, divided from the pasture by a dry-rotted fence. Dozens of weathered stones perched over the bones of dozens of Bodts, generations of people who lived and loved and died on this godforsaken scrap of land. There’s a light in the upper floor of the house, shining out my parents’ bedroom window. The curtains are drawn and I’m too far off to see even if they weren’t, but my imagination is unkind enough to fill in the blanks for me.

My mother, like everyone else, probably looks older, her hair more gray than black as she sits and brushes it out, frown lines tugging down at the corners of her mouth. My father probably looks the same, give or take a few inches of his hairline, sitting in his chair beside the window with his pipe and newspaper, oblivious to the fact that the son he tried so hard to make the world forget is only yards away.

My fingertips brush the grip of the Colt at my waist, and for the first time in forever, it feels like _power_ instead of a reflex. I could do it. I could. The back door’s always unlocked, and with the party going on across the farm, no one would hear the shots. One-two. Easy as shooting cans off a fence post. Easy as shooting Levi Ackerman. I could do it.

But I won’t. I’ve already learned the hard way that there’s no closure in bloodshed. There’s no justice in vengeance, and in a way, something tells me that the old man would find some kind of sick satisfaction in dying by my hand, showing the world what an irredeemable monster I am once and for all. I won’t play into that, so I take my hand off the gun, try to ignore how I feel weaker once I do. But even without bloody revenge, I find what I went looking for. The fear and anger and hopelessness are soaked into this ground, borne in the blood of my ancestors before me, abandoned to history as nothing but faded names on slanting rocks. Dead. Forgotten.

This is what I fought so hard to get away from. This is where I ended up regardless.

‘Marco Bodt,’ the stone in front of me reads. ‘June 16, 1914 – August 3, 1930. Beloved son and brother.’

_Our son is dead._

Five years later, Pa, but I’m finally starting to agree with you.

Jean finally catches up, trips into a dead stop beside me and whispers, “Jesus Christ.”

“‘Our son is dead.’” I tell him, the words ringing hollow, the first time I’ve ever given them a real voice. “That's what they told me before I left. Connie said they had a funeral and everything. Told everyone I died in a tractor accident. Half of Telico showed up. Guess I never really believed they'd rather bury me than let people know the truth.”

I’ve always known that Jean was a better person than me. I didn’t need any evidence that he had more of a capacity for basic human kindness than I did, but he shows it to me anyway, reaching out the hand that recoiled from me an hour ago and twining his fingers up with mine. “God, baby, I'm so sorry.”

“But they all know the truth now!” The laugh _hurts,_ scrapes up my throat like a rusty razor, but I can’t stop it, cackling over Jean’s attempts to shush me and throwing my arms open wide, daring my father or God or the forces of Fate to take a shot at me. “They all know _everything!_ And what does it get me? What did it all _fuckin’_ get me?! Five months in Eastham, losing my eye, losing my damn _self_ , and all I get’s a rock with my name on it.”

“Marco…” Jean starts, but it’s not enough, his concern and good intentions just aren’t _enough_ to keep me together anymore, glancing off my scarred skin like he never spoke at all as I slump down to my knees in front of my own grave, fingertips mapping out the indents in the stone.

“Guess that's all any of us ever get, though, when you think about it.” I hum, wondering how long it will take the wind and dust to wear down my name until I’m a just shallow furrow in a grimy rock like my great-great-grandfather. He drove down South in a covered wagon, built a cattle ranch out of empty land with his bare hands, and he’s still just a pile of moldering old bones under six feet of drought-plagued dirt. “We spend our whole lives workin’ for what we want, tryin’ to make our mark, and in the end all we get to do is die.”

All I ever wanted was immortality. The only thing I’ve ever worked for was the assurance that someday, I wouldn’t just be a name on a gravestone somewhere outside of Nowhere, Texas. I wanted to be a legend, a story all to myself, something that would live on in the pages of history books for ages. That goal was the only thing that kept me going when I was starving and homeless, when I was fighting through hell every day in Eastham, when I was clawing my way out of nightmares to Jean’s concerned eyes and silent questions.

And now, back where it all began, I’m finally struck by the futility of it all. Billy the Kid, Jesse James, Al Capone, John Dillinger, they’re all legends.

And they’re all dead bodies under a rock somewhere.

So what has it all been for? How much of myself have I sacrificed in the name of a legacy that I’ll never get to witness? How many people have died for a page in a history book I’ll never get to read? How many years of whatever life I could have carved out in some corner of the world with Jean did I burn to fuel that nagging part of me that always wanted _more?_ Whatever the finer points of those answers may be, they all sum up to ‘too much.’ Good memories of bad places might be dangerous, but they don’t have nearly as much power to destroy you as finding out that you’ve crushed every good thing you’ve ever held for no reason at all. There’s no longer any comfort in knowing that all hope is lost. Instead, I do what you’re supposed to do in a graveyard.

I mourn. And between the hitching breaths and tears streaking down one side of my face, I think to myself that maybe the grave in front of me isn’t all that false, because I know for a fact that I’m sitting here crying over Marco Bodt and everything he could have been if he hadn’t tried to live forever.

“I can’t… I…” It feels like that’s all I’ve been saying. I can’t stay in the barn and let my ghosts catch up with me. I can’t watch the faces of my brothers, of nieces and nephews I’ve never met, knowing that I can never come home, that _home_ never even existed for me the way it does for a little boy who shares my name and will grow up praying to not share my legacy. I can’t come to terms with the hard facts of my own mortality, not even staring it right in the face. I can’t do anything anymore. I am a frail, helpless thing, fallen so far that all I have left of my big love and big dreams is Jean’s hand in mine and a broken, half-sobbed wish over an empty grave. “If they kill me, don’t let ‘em put me here, Jean. _Promise me_ you won’t let ‘em put me here.”

Jean swallows hard, reaching down to give my shoulder a squeeze. “Baby, odds are if you end up dead, so will I.”

Together or not at all. The last hope I had becomes a curse, acrid and tight in the back of my throat, and my pitiful crying becomes an outright _wail,_ the last strand of my sanity stretching and snapping as I scrabble at the ground, dusty dirt clotting with the blood under my fingernails, trying to dig down and curl up in the empty coffin beneath me so I can finally be where I belong.

And Jean – Jean, who was too afraid to even look at me on the ride down from Dallas, Jean, who’s been hurt more than anyone on my fool’s errand of an existence, Jean, who’s brave and beautiful and kind and so much more than I’ve ever deserved – he kneels beside me, pulls my bloody hands from the earth.

And he holds me. His thin fingers lace through my hair and his heartbeat thrums beneath my ear and he _holds me,_ steady and soft until the fallout of my own personal disaster quiets. “I promise. Hey, it’s okay, I promise.”

I deflate in his arms, boneless and shaky, but calm for the moment. He won’t let me become nothing. He won’t let me be gone. For all of the lies and heartbreak and burned letters, I can trust him for that much.

“Maybe you're right,” he says, voice wavering, eyes shining too-bright at the angle the moon hits them when he leans down to rest his forehead against mine. “Maybe in the end, all any of us get to do is die. But there's a whole lotta time between being born and dying. And in that time, some of us - if we're lucky - get to live.”

I laugh weakly, looking at the dried-up land, at the dust and blood on both of our hands. “And you think we're the lucky ones?”

“I don't know much of anything anymore,” he shrugs, leaning back to wipe the tears off my face with his ragged shirtsleeve before pressing his palm there, warm and familiar, the pad of his thumb sweeping across my cheekbone. “I don't know who I am, or who you are, or what it's all been for. But one thing I do know is that every second I've spent with you, I've _lived_. That's more than some people ever get.”

“Was it worth it?” I ask. “Gettin’ to live for a year, if all this has been the price of it?”

“Are you askin’ me, or yourself?”

Maybe both. Maybe neither. I can’t wrap my head around it, so I push it away, standing up and brushing the graveyard dirt off my pants. “No point in the question now, I guess. C’mon, we can’t be out here. Any more kids run outta that house, we’re fucked.”

Just like the last time I walked away from my childhood home, I don’t look back. I take the weakness that I spilled all over an empty grave, and I leave it behind, because I can’t afford to let it weigh me down. Jean walks beside me, the distance from before back between us, and he stays quiet.

“Marco,” he finally says, breaking the silence right before we get back to the barn.

“Yeah?”

“It was worth it.” Stopping, he turns over and looks at me with this wide-eyed stare that looks like an epiphany, the wind ruffling up his hair as it blows around the corner of the barn. “What we had back then, what we’re tryin’ to save, it was worth it.”

“And what we have now?” I ask him.

He just stares off at the empty horizon, fixed on something out there that I can’t see. “No one ever said it would be easy.”

“No, they sure as hell didn’t.”

After a minute, he reaches down and takes my hand. It’s not absolution, but it’s something to hold on to.

The barn door is cracked open when we round the corner, rolling back with a shriek. Jean’s jaw clenches, apprehension pulling tight at his shoulders as he takes a step inside, a hand dropping to his hip to tug the gun out of his waistband. We’re not alone. The twinge in my gut tells me so a second before a small shadow flits around the front end of the car and Jean’s arm moves forward in a blur, pulling back the hammer on the revolver in time with his sharp intake of breath.

“Wait,” I hiss, stepping in front of him and squinting into the darkness between two retired tractors. “It’s all right. You can come out.”

The shadow flickers, becoming real as it shuffles forward into the moonlight beaming down from a hole in the roof, more real than memories, more real than dreams, bare feet and scared eyes and a long mane of dark curls.

My heart _hurts_ with how hard it clenches. “Maura.”

My baby sister isn’t a baby anymore. She’s taller, almost up to my shoulder, all long, skinny limbs and sharp features like Mick’s, stuck somewhere between a cute little girl and a pretty young woman. Twelve years old. Almost thirteen. The last time I saw her, she had on a blue gingham dress and wore her hair braided down her back, secondhand shoes polished to a gleam. Now, she looks like a street urchin, barefoot and dusty and _hungry,_ threadbare dress hanging off angular shoulders and tendrils of hair falling down over hazel eyes that seem too-big peering out of the dark shadows beneath them.

“Miles reckoned you’d be back sometime,” she says. Even her voice is different, gone from the joyful shouts I remember to the hushed care of someone who walks on the edge of disaster with every step.

“Is he inside?” Swallowing the panic that knots up at the base of my throat, I look over my shoulder, back towards the house. “Maura, please—“

She shakes her head, cutting me off. “I ain’t gonna tell him.”

“Thank you,” I sigh, taking a step closer to her. “God, look at you.”

Something twitches downwards at the corners of her mouth, a hand coming up like she means to run it over the scarred side of my face but stilling an inch away. No one wants to touch a dead man. “You look different, too.”

“Reckon I do.” I try to smile, but it’s too sad to be anywhere close, nodding back over my shoulder. “This is Jean. He—“

“I know who he is.”

“Oh.”

Maura frowns a little deeper, scuffing her foot to make a pattern in the dust settled across the floorboards. She won’t look me in the eye. “You two’re all anyone talks about since that newspaper came out. Things got bad. Pa broke some furniture and Ma yelled a lot and Mick actually came home.”

“Are you okay?” I’ve lived through too much of things ‘getting bad’ to take the phrase at face value, immediately looking at her harder, searching for bruises, for swollen lips or pain in the way she carries herself, a bit of rage kindling amidst all the suffocating sadness. “If they hurt you, I swear to _God…_ ”

“Matt and Chelsea came and got me the day after Mick went back on the road,” she shrugs, still staring at her feet, refusing to look at me. “Been livin’ with them ever since. The twins run the ranch, and Ma and Pa stay in the big house and don’t come out. Money’s bad, bank’s comin’ by every other day, but we’re getttin’ by. Mick and Martin send a check when they can.”

Thank God, they got her out. We all knew the circumstances that we grew up under, protected each other when we could, as best we could. Miles would take the flack for me the same as I’d take the flack for Mick the same as the twins would take the flack for each other. But Maura, all alone in that house with my name all over the papers and my parents’ newly rekindled rage…

Matthew knew how the story went well enough to get her out. I wish I could find some way to thank him that wouldn’t result in my subsequent arrest and death.

After a moment, Maura finally looks up, a slow sweep of her eyes from Jean to me, sadness that’s far too heavy for a twelve-year-old in them. “This is my fault, ain’t it?”

 _“No._ ” I _refuse_ to let her be another of my casualties, leaning down and grabbing her by her bony shoulders. She jumps and shudders, and I can’t really expect better from a girl who’s just been touched by a ghost, but the way she reacts to the sudden contact isn’t all because of me. I take a moment to contemplate going back to the big house with a gun before reminding myself that there are more important things that bloodshed won’t save. “Maura, look at me. _None_ of this is your fault.”

“If I hadn’t told Ma…”

“You were six years old. You didn’t understand what you saw.”

“I thought I _killed you._ ” Her voice cracks, shaking so hard that the rest of her emaciated body shakes with it. “No one really thought it was an accident, you know. Miles and Martin tried for _ages_ to find out what happened, but they couldn’t find anything. Mick ran off to Chicago and didn’t even send a letter for four years. Everyone was tryin’ so hard to do right by you, and I didn’t say anything because I’d seen what happened when I opened my mouth the first time.”

“You didn’t cause this,” I tell her, wishing that I could take her hurt and make it mine. She never deserved this.

“But you let me think I did.” She never deserved this, the guilt and the loneliness, but I gave it to her anyway, all wrapped up in an empty coffin and lies I never bothered to refute. Maura must be a kind of strong that I could never hope to be, so young and bearing all of those demons with little more than a waver to her voice and shadows under her eyes. “Do you know what it’s like, being six years old, thinkin’ you just murdered the one person you cared about? You know what that _does_ to you?”

“I’m…” _Sorry._ It almost comes out, but I catch it behind clenched teeth and twist it around, make it into something that I can say without crumbling. “I didn’t have a choice.”

“Is that what you told yourself every time you thought about coming home?” asks Maura, so far from convinced that it might almost be comical if it didn’t hurt so damned badly. “Or did you ever even think of us after you left?”

“Of course I did.” More than I wanted to, more than I told myself I did, but telling her about all of that convoluted shit would drag her headfirst into the nastiest parts of my head. I wouldn’t wish those demons on anyone, much less my sister.

“Is that why you’re back now?” she asks.

I don’t say anything. I can’t lie to her anymore.

Maura’s eyes narrow, and she gives a tiny shake of her head, taking a step back. “Didn’t figure you were.”

“I’m in trouble, Maura. We both are.” I confess, chancing a look back at Jean, who’s got a wounded expression on his face that says this is all hitting a little too close to home. “Jean and I are… we’re going away, until all this fuss dies down.”

“If you didn’t want a fuss, why’d you start robbing banks?”

“You wouldn’t understand—“

 _“Don’t,”_ she seethes, fists balling up at her sides, “talk to me like that. I understand more than folks think I do. I understand enough.”

I nod, patting down her hair where it’s ruffled in the back. She used to sit down on the ground in the pasture while Connie and I were working and beg me to braid it for her when Ma was too busy. Now, she just acts like the touch is painful, something to be endured rather than remembered. She’s so young to have seen this much hurt. All of us were.

“You understand too much,” I whisper, taking a step back so Maura doesn’t have to.

“And whose fault is that?”

“Mine.” She knows, but I need to tell her myself, drive it home that of all the people who have been consumed by whatever kind of hellfire I’ve always had in me, she can’t let herself be a victim. “And don’t you ever forget that all of this was my fault, not yours. You don’t deserve blame or guilt or anything you went through ‘cause of me, but there’s not a lot I can do to fix it now.”

“No, guess there ain’t.” When Maura was five years old, she fell out of the hayloft, banged herself up all over on the way down. She tried so hard not to cry, because Mick and I were there, because even as the only girl in the family, Pa drove into her head the same way he drove into ours that weakness was one of the most heinous sins. And she’s still fighting, still blinking back the wetness pooling in her eyes and holding her spine straight against its efforts to curl her into something smaller. “So you’re gonna leave. Again.”

She’s doing a better job than I am.

“C’mere,” I rasp out, holding out my arms without any real hope that she’ll listen, thrown off-balance when she throws her arms around my waist and breaks down, tears mixing with the dried bloodstains on my shirt. She gets this luxury. She’s allowed to break, and I won’t tell a soul, because it only takes Jean’s presence off to the side to remind me that sometimes we don’t want to be alone with our weaknesses. Maura and I aren’t alone with ours, clinging to each other and trying to remember what we’re fighting for. I might be beyond saving, but I still have the part of me that wants to be strong for her, hiding my face in her hair so she doesn’t have to see her brother crying like a fool over all the things he’s lost. “I love you.”

Maura just cries harder, her skinny frame heaving with sobs as she clings to my shirt, and I don’t have it in me to let her go, hurting enough as it is when I lean back far enough to wipe the sticky tracks of tears off her cheeks.

“Hey, hey, c’mon now, no tears,” I tell her, ignoring my own hypocrisy as I blink hard and swallow the ache balled up somewhere in the back of my throat. I sit there and watch her until her spine straightens again, gently pushing her shoulders back until she stands tall and nudging her chin up with one finger until her head’s held high. “Shoulders back, chin up. Don’t let ‘em see you cry. And try to be smarter than your idiot brother. You’re already doing a good job on that front.”

She swallows hard, wiping at her eyes, and it takes her all of five seconds to compose herself. She’s made of steel, tempered by hardships she should never have had to go through. She’s strong. She’ll be okay.

On one condition.

For all of my talk of being numb, there’s _conviction_ in how I reach out and take one of her hands in both of mine, staring her down across the dusty stillness of the barn. “Maura, listen to me. You don’t have to forgive me or trust me or anything else, but I want you to promise me something. I want you to swear to me that you’ll get outta this place. As soon as you’re able to, you run, you hear me? You run as fast and far as you can, and you don’t ever look back. Reckon you can do that?”

A long moment passes, but she nods. “Reckon I can.”

“Shake on it?” I ask, and she takes my hand with a steel grip and a quick shake – up, down, release – before she steps back, glancing out the barn door towards the house. They’ll start looking for her soon. Maura still belongs here. I don’t. I almost manage a convincing smile as I guide her out to the barnyard. “Attagirl. Go on back inside, now, before someone misses you.”

I watch her go, feeling like yet another part of me’s been ripped away. I suppose I can celebrate the small victories, console myself with the knowledge that I did what was best for her. I could have been selfish. I could have put her in the car and gone, the way I should have done when I was sixteen. But Maura’s still got her good memories in this horrible place, still has Matt and Maddox and the rest of them, people who can care for her better than the ghost of her dead brother can. I could have taken her with me. I let her go. I’m too far gone for it to be a step towards redemption, but maybe it’s a step out of the grave.

Jean comes up beside me, silent in his own contemplation. I ask him, “Still think that it’s all been worth it?”

He doesn’t answer me. Neither of us really wants to know.

The gleam of headlights draws up on the horizon, closer and closer until Jean and I retreat into the barn, waiting with guns drawn and bated breaths as the hum of the engine rolls up outside the barn and cuts off, replaced with footsteps and the door thrown open and—

“You stupid, crazy, reckless, bull-headed _sonuvabitch_ …” Connie fumes, planting a hand in the center of my chest and shoving me back with all the momentum he built up storming through the door. “How the hell are you still alive?”

“I could ask you the same question,” I quip, nodding down at the bullet holes riddling the side of the car.

“Jean!” Sasha comes in right on Connie’s heels, making a beeline for Jean, who hugs her back until she pulls away to fuss over him, tutting at his dirty clothes and tear-swollen eyes. “Are you okay, honey? What happened?”

He doesn’t answer her, derailing the conversation in favor of both of our sanities. “You made it out of Dallas okay?”

“If you define ‘okay’ as ‘by the skin of our teeth with a few bullets in our bumper,’ then yeah, sure,” Connie cuts in scratching at the back of his head and nodding down at the mess the cops made of the car. “All hell had broken loose at the bank and y’all were gone by the time we got back around. Lawmen _everywhere,_ people screamin’ in the streets, whole place was such a mess that we got lucky and only one of ‘em saw us… What the hell did you _do,_ brother?”

“I killed Levi Ackerman.”

_“What.”_

I shrug and nick a cigarette out of his breast pocket, slumping back against the wall and wishing this part could just be over. “Put six rounds in his head. You can go ahead and lose your shit, but it ain’t gonna undo what happened.”

He gapes at me for a full minute before his brain remembers how to work and he picks his jaw up off the floor, closing his eyes and heaving out a sigh. “I… you… Okay. Okay, we can still work with this. We’ve just gotta get on the phone with Mick, see if we can make that rendezvous in New Orleans happen any faster. We can salvage this.”

“You’re awful calm, considering the circumstances.”

“I am,” Connie growls, reaching out and balling up a fist in the front of my shirt, “the _polar opposite_ of calm right now. But as I am clearly the only man in this absolute _shitshow_ capable of rational thought anymore, I don’t have the luxury of bashing you upside the head, because I’m a little busy thinking of how to save all our goddamned lives.”

“We’re not callin’ Mick,” Jean chimes in from the background, as calmly as if he’s mentioning a shift in the weather.

“The hell we ain’t—“

 _“No!”_ And there goes Jean’s composure along with Connie’s, his eyes narrowing to amber slits as he steps between Connie and me, staring him down. “We drag Michael back into this, we drag Eren with him, and now that we’ve got this kinda blood on our names…”

Now that _I’ve_ put this kind of blood on our names. No one needs to say it. It’s there in how they all take a pause to look at me before going back to the conversation at hand.

Jean clenches his jaw, rubbing a hand down the side of his face and taking a heavy breath. “I’ve had enough. I’ve had enough of my people gettin’ hurt ‘cause of all this. It’s not gonna happen again.”

“What would you have us do, Jean?” Connie asks, exasperated.

“We wait it out,” says Jean, steadier than anyone else in the room. He reaches into his pocket, pulls out the stack of papers that Michael gave us and begins to look them over for the umpteenth time. “We move fast, we lay low, and we hold out until the day we can get on that boat. There ain’t another option.”

Connie laughs, high-pitched and a little hysterical, looking over at Jean’s shoulder at me in a silent plea to take his side. “See, the problem is, you’re outvoted on our course of action.”

“No he isn’t.” I shake my head, lighting the stolen smoke and walking up to stand beside Jean. “We’re done callin’ in favors. It’s too dangerous for us to put Mick and Eren back in the line of fire. They wouldn’t make it out.”

“You’re worried about inconveniencing your brother when you just _blew an FBI agent’s brains out—_ “

“I’m worried about gettin’ my brother _killed!_ ” I shout, the echo of it bouncing around the silence that falls in the barn in my wake. Calm doesn’t come easy, but I fight for it, screwing my eyes shut and willing the rising wail in my head back into submission. “For the first time in his life, he’s innocent. I won’t let any more innocent people get tangled up in this.”

I think of Maura. My chest aches.

“What a time for you to develop a moral compass,” Connie scoffs, and it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, keeping myself from punching his lights out.

“None of us has a moral compass anymore, Connie,” says Jean, doing such a good job of hiding the way his hands shake that I think I’m the only one who notices it. “We’re all just stumbling through the dark, hoping we don’t fall off a cliff. The only morality I’ve got anymore is the part of me that doesn’t want anyone else to have to be where we are now, especially not people I care about. And if you can’t respect that, then you can take it up with Marco and me once we’re on that boat to Mexico. But until then, don’t go throwing around the word ‘outvoted’ like any of this is _anywhere_ close to a democracy. Call it what it is.”

“And what would that be?”

“A couple of people who have done a lot of shit wrong trying to do one thing right.”

“I…” Connie goes to work up an argument, but gives up halfway to a rebuttal, sighing and pinching the bridge of his nose. “Y’know what, let’s just go. We’ll head to that place in Arkansas we shacked up at in September.”

He’s in the car with the engine started before I have time to ask him about the change of heart, and really, I don’t have the energy to question it. Instead, I pile back into the passenger seat of the V8 we stole from Levi Ackerman, silent as Jean starts the car and drives out of the barn.

We follow Connie and Sasha’s taillights through miles of silence, until Telico is nothing but a dot on the horizon, but I feel like I can’t get away. Every time I blink, my sister’s gaunt face and the sorrow I gave her burns behind my eyelids, dragging me back into the death spiral down into my own mind.

“It doesn’t matter,” Jean says somewhere past Dallas, startling me.

“What doesn’t?” I ask.

“If it was all worth it or not. It doesn’t matter, because this is what we have,” he says, eyes never leaving the road, a determination in them that I haven’t seen in a long time. “But if we give up now, then it’s all been for nothing. I don’t want that.”

“Yeah. I don’t want that either,” I mutter, lapsing back into another long silence before I look up again. “Jean.”

“What?”

“I’m…” _Sorry._ It almost slips out again, but I bite it back even though it hurts, sucking in a deep breath and reaching down to rest my hand over his on top of the gearshift. He doesn’t pull away. “I’d do a lot of things differently if I had the chance. But not loving you. I figure that’s gotta be worth something.”

“It is,” he says after a few minutes. “It’s worth a lot.”

Once we’re out of Texas, Connie and Sasha ditch the bullet-riddled getaway car and swap the tags on the V8, Connie taking the wheel while Jean and I pile into the back seat to rest. The distance fades to a blur beneath our tires. I grow acutely aware of every heartbeat, slow and steady against my ribs. I’m not a name on a gravestone. I’m not a ghost. Not yet. This is what I have, and if I give up on it, then it loses what little meaning it has left. Miles and hushed breaths and heartbeats, off-tempo with Jean’s when he leans against me somewhere between the Arkansas state line and Oblivion. This is what I have.

I’m alive. I love him.

It’s got to be worth something.


	28. Jean

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Woah. Over a year later. Hi guys.
> 
> So, long story short, I graduated college and moved to California and got a big-person job, and that's where I've been for the last year. But HELLO!
> 
> There are two more hapters left before ATSIT is over (holy crow), but because of my job and stuff I can't give you a definitive release date for those last two chapters. I'm gonna go as fast as I can, I promise. So, without further ado...
> 
> No one important dies in this chapter but I'm going to warn for gun violence, blood, and mildly graphic descriptions of injury.
> 
> This chapter's companion soundtrack can be found [here.](http://8tracks.com/southspinner/chapter-twenty-eight-jean)
> 
> I have a [tumblr.](http://southspinner.tumblr.com)

Once we make it to Arkansas, it rains for a whole week.

It’s not the merciful summer showers that anyone coming out of drought-plagued Texas would have pleasant dreams about – it’s cold, miserable January rain, coming down in sheets, soaking our clothes and chilling our bones through the holes in the dilapidated rooftops we hide beneath. We can’t afford to be picky about hideouts anymore. There are no more days where we feel like we’re far enough or safe enough to risk a motel room, no more empty houses now that our tactics are national knowledge. We stick to abandoned sheds with sagging walls and empty storehouses on repossessed farms, always at least a mile’s walk from where we hid the car. No jobs. No unnecessary trips. Just watching the growing stretch of checkmarks on Sasha’s pocketbook calendar.

Waiting.

It’s not too different from all the time we spent on the move right after Joplin – not if you ignore all the blood and death and heartbreak that happened between then and now. We’ve all got our ways of occupying ourselves. Sasha prays. Connie whittles. Marco reads. And me… well. I hold on to the last fragile scraps of my sanity. That’s hard enough to keep me busy.

Something’s been broken in Marco for what feels like a lifetime, but it grows quieter after Telico, less vicious and more exhausted. I know better to think that he found whatever it is he’s been looking for somewhere in Levi Ackerman’s brains spattered across the floor of the Dallas National Bank. If the numbness with which he moves through his days means anything, he probably just got tired of looking for it and let it go.

There’s no relief in seeing him like this. Silence doesn’t mean peace, especially not for him. None of us really get much sleep anymore, not that it would give us any respite if we did. Still, I’d take the nightmares over the nights when we both lie awake, staring at each other through the dark and the silence. I’d take all the ugliest parts of my own mind over hour-long eternities where I look at him and he looks at me and for once in our miserable lives, neither of us has a plan. We’re both in mourning, and you can't strategize your way out of grief, can't fight your way through a loss so great that it takes the best part of you with it. You just lie there, and you look into eyes that used to keep you grounded, and you wait for sunrise. You get up. You try your best to put one foot in front of the other. And it goes on. And on. And on. A hurt like that doesn’t give you a moment to rest. You keep moving with it, or it crushes you.

There must have been a time when running with him felt like freedom. I no longer remember it.

We lie awake through rain on rusted metal roofs roaring so cold and loud that after four or five or a million nights I almost don’t feel Marco’s hand close around mine, almost don’t hear a cracked whisper of, “Tell me something good, Jean.”

I wait for the roll of thunder so he won’t have to hear me say, “I can’t.”

“Remember Annie’s club?” he asks, and the look in his eye is so distant that I can’t help but wonder if he’s talking to me or himself. “The music and the red curtains?”

I think I forgot how to cry, somewhere between Telico and here. The backs of my eyes feel hot and stinging, but I just lie there and breathe, no sobs, no hitch in my voice. The ache in my chest is an echoing, cavernous one. “We danced in a storage closet. You kept stepping on my feet.”

“You played that trumpet and everyone in the place stopped to look at you.” I wish to God I could hear some warmth in his voice, anything that would make him sound like he’s talking about  _ us _ instead of reading a page from someone else’s story. But it’s empty. Hollow. The way you talk about a dream you can’t quite remember once you’ve woken up. “And I sat there and I watched you and I thought, ‘That’s my boy. Look at him smile. He’s gonna look like that from here on out.’ And I loved you. And I wanna believe you loved me, right then.”

“I did.” I mean it, as much as anyone can mean that they loved a moment in a dream that’s slipping through their fingers.

“That night,” says Marco, cold as a corpse beside me, wet hair sticking to his forehead, biting back shivers, “all those nights. Those were something good. Weren’t they?”

I hate that he’s not sure. I hate that  _ I’m _ not sure. I hate that anything good has been so far from us for so long that we can’t remember how it felt anymore.

I remember the dim light in that supply closet. I remember laughing every time Marco stumbled over my feet. I remember his arms around me, warm and strong, the music far away, his lips so much closer. I remember being a boy so deliriously in love that he felt like nothing could touch him.

I don’t remember how to be that boy again.

“I think they were,” I tell him after a while, with as much confidence as someone who doesn’t know how to  _ be _ anymore can muster.

_ “Alice took up the fan and gloves and she kept fanning herself all the time she went on talking. ‘Dear, dear! How queer everything is today! And yesterday things went on just as usual. Was I the same when I got up this morning? But if I'm not the same, the next question is, 'Who in the world am I?' Ah, that's the great puzzle!’” _

“I think they were too,” Marco says. He doesn’t say anything else. We lie there, and I look at him, and he looks at me, and eventually the night gives way to a gray sunrise. And we get up. And we keep moving.

Maybe neither of us can remember how it feels to love each other without all the blood and crime and murder in the way, but that doesn’t mean it never happened. And maybe, if we can hold on to that one part of the dream before it fades away, it’ll keep us going long enough to learn all over again. Until then, this is what we have: good memories made by people who don’t even feel like us anymore and trying to hold them close somewhere within what’s left of us.

Our morning routine has become quick and to-the-point. No food means no breakfast, no time for idle chatter as we eliminate every trace of ourselves from each hideout and get ready to move on to the next. The most conversation that happens anymore is when someone manages to steal a newspaper off someone’s front porch and we use the information inside to plan out where we should go next, whether the law is sticking close to Texas or if they’re closing in enough that we need to spend another night parking the car in the woods and sleeping there. Today, the paper says that all of the relevant leaders on the Bodt Gang task force are meeting in Dallas to discuss strategy, so we let ourselves breathe. Sasha hums as she folds damp clothes into the suitcases. I could swear that a sliver of sun makes its way through the rain. I don’t trust it.

“We should head south,” I frown, tracing my fingertips over the headline. “This could be a trap. They know we read the papers. I wanna be close to New Orleans in case something goes wrong.”

“Ain’t no laws jumping outta the bushes, Jean, slow your roll,” Connie says, rolling a cigarette and groaning in frustration when the leaky ceiling dampens the paper. Sasha’s halfway through the refrain of ‘In The Sweet By And By.’ I feel like there’s something cold and electric crawling under my skin. It isn’t pleasant.

“Not yet,” I mutter, eyes flicking back and forth between the newspaper and the door.

“Jean’s right,” Marco says, noncommittal, staring at his shoes. He probably didn’t even hear what I said.

Connie curses and shoves himself violently off the wall he’s been leaning against, storming out the door before anyone else can get a word in edgewise. Sasha stops humming, a threadbare shirt hanging lifelessly from her hands. For a moment, there’s nothing but the steady drip, drip, drip of water from the ceiling to the floor, the clamor of rain against the walls. My mother used to tell me stories of storms that would come in off the ocean before I was born, wind and rain that could wash whole towns off the map. I think it says something about how I view total destruction now; that what used to sound like tragedy sounds more like a clean slate. I wonder if the rain could wash away this little shed in the middle of nowhere and take me with it, out through the creeks and rivers and oceans, far away from everything that’s made me just as rickety and fragile as the sagging walls and leaking roof around me. It’s wishful thinking. We’re all in the same storm, and it would be selfish of me to willingly be the first to fall. I’ve put enough selfishness out into the world.

And with nothing there to hold him up, Marco wouldn’t last long either. It’s that knowledge that makes me hold my spine a little straighter even though everything in me is screaming for me to just let it snap.

“You gonna go talk to him?” I ask Marco after a long moment. I don’t get an answer.

It’s my own fault for asking, really. Expecting an answer out of him nowadays might as well be asking for the moon.

Sighing, I sidestep Marco and Sasha and follow Connie outside to where he’s huddled under the foot or so of protection from the rain the edge of the roof gives, the rusty hinges of the door squealing in protest when I shut it behind me. We’ve spent the better part of two days hungry, cold, and cooped up together in what’s probably an old storage shed, and that would be enough to make tensions high without everything else, but I can’t just write it off. A united front is all we’ve got left between us and a cellblock or worse.

If Connie feels the same, he doesn’t show it, his back turned to me and his shoulders tight as he takes difficult drags off his damp cigarette.

“Look, I can give you one free punch if it’ll make you feel better, but you gotta tell me what’s eatin’ you first,” I offer, walking over to stand next to him.

Connie won’t meet my eyes. “Ain’t nothin’ you did.”

“That’s debatable.”

“Nah.” His cigarette finally burns past the damp spot and flares to life with a cloud of smoke passing over his lips and dissipating into the rain. “I’ve been friends with Marco my whole life, and crazy’s somethin’ you’re born with. I knew what I was signing up for, runnin’ with him. That’s more than you could say.”

I remember when it used to make me angry, people saying that I didn’t know what I was doing. Now, with a little more perspective and a lot more heartbreak, I want to go back and find the me that argued with Erwin Smith and Levi Ackerman in a diner and swore that he knew the consequences. I want to find that boy and slap him senseless and tell him that he doesn’t even know what  _ consequences _ means. That it gets so, so much worse from where he is. But as things are, time travel only exists in books, and if it were real I wouldn’t even know where to go in order to change the way things are now. Maybe I couldn’t. Maybe it was always going to happen this way.

But at least I can look back on that stupidly in love boy standing up for his heart in that diner and claim ignorance. I can say that I didn’t know what I was signing up for, and now I can believe it. I wonder if Connie’s cross to bear is heavier than mine because he can’t even say he didn’t see it coming.

It must be heavy. It looks like it’s crushing him, all smoke and silence as he watches lightning strike the hazy gray horizon. “S’more than Sasha could say.”

I think of her standing on the other side of the wall at our backs, holding that shirt limply in her hands and watching Connie walk out like the last scrap of happiness had been stolen from her. My chest aches.

“Sasha’s stronger than any one of us,” I say, as much to make myself feel better as to comfort Connie.

“She shouldn’t have to be, Jean.” It comes out so  _ tired _ , so broken that it barely sounds like him. We’ve all become shadows of ourselves, but I somehow always felt like that darkness touched Connie less than the rest of us, that he was too much of a live wire to let it touch him. The truth of the matter is that either he was better at hiding it than the rest of us, I pretended not to see it so I could avoid another pound of guilt on my back, or some mixture of the two. I look at Connie for a moment, and he looks at me, and this dreadfully sad would-be laugh huffs out of his throat before he says, “She shouldn’t even be here. And that’s on me, man. That’s on me.”

“I’m sure she doesn’t blame you--”

“That ain’t the  _ point, _ Jean, Christ,” he grinds out through clenched teeth, throwing what’s left of his smoke away and watching it smolder out in the mud. When he finally looks at me, it’s with the eyes of a man who hasn’t seen a peaceful night’s sleep in a long damn time. The same kind of eyes I see in my own reflection, or whenever Marco gets out of his own head long enough to notice I’m there. “We had a good thing goin’, y’know? I was this scrawny little do-nothin’ farm kid with no prospects and her daddy hated me, so we had to run off, but we had a good thing. I got myself a job, we had a place, had plans for a couple kids, and I just… I loved her. And she loved me, and if I was any kind of smart I would’ve realized that we didn’t need nothin’ more than that, ‘stead of going off and chasing down Marco Bodt’s millionth goddamn pipe dream. I made a promise to take care of her and protect her, and now…”

To a degree, I can understand it, feeling like you’ve let down the person that’s your everything. But I don’t want to say that we have common ground, not when I’m half the reason for the mess we’re all in.

“She still loves you,” I say instead, trying to give consolation without taking blame. “She’s told me.”

“I know she does,” says Connie, giving me a sad smile and watching the rain drip off the edge of the roof. “Even though I took all those things we wanted and threw ‘em away. Even though I changed everything.”

This isn’t my story by a long shot and it’s not my place to feel sorry for myself, but I can’t help thinking back, all the way back before the beach in Louisiana or Annie’s club, back to when all I wanted was a trumpet and a stage and Marco in the front row. Big dreams. Dreams he promised me would come true.

I loved him even as I watched those dreams slip away, the New York skyline I never even got to see fading into the dusty distance.

“I think that’s what real love is, y’know.” Connie seems like he’s watching something very far away, some great perhaps that he and Sasha could have had lingering out beyond his reach. “It’s easy to love the person you fell in love with. It’s why you fell in love with ‘em. But loving that person even when they change… that takes work. That gets hard. Maybe you’re hoping that one day the person you fell in love with will come back, but in the meantime, you gotta love the chance that they won’t. Folks like you and Sasha are made of steel for even bein’ able to try.”

I have never been steel. Steel is what it takes to love someone unconditionally and unselfishly, and I am made of something far more brittle, something that felt loving Marco through his brokenness start to hollow me out inside a long time ago. I am made of something that loved him with a double-edge that harmed as much as it healed, that stayed and clung and corroded until what was left was no longer recognizable. I am made of rust.

“She seemed almost happy this morning. I just wanted her to be able to hold onto it for a bit longer,” Connie says.

“You said you made a promise to protect her.” And I can understand that, too. Marco and I might not have anything so concrete as vows or a marriage certificate, but we have that moment when I pulled him, bleeding and unconscious, out of Dallas National Bank and swore to deal with whatever came after as long as it meant keeping him alive. Connie and I both have promises to keep. “If we wanna keep them safe, we have to move. We can try the whole ‘letting ourselves be happy’ thing again once we make it over the border.”

Connie nods, and I go to turn around and go back inside. “Fair enough. Hey, Jean?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it,” I shrug, leaving out the unspoken  _ Please. I can deal with destroying people’s lives as long as no one tries to thank me for it. _

The four of us pack up and slog through a soaking, miserable mile to the car, heading south on all the back roads we can manage to navigate in the downpour. By nightfall we make it out of the rain and as far as Shreveport, Louisiana before my vision starts blurring from hunger and fatigue and I pull off into a campground on the side of the road, looking to the others for council. “Are we all hungry?”

A chorus of weary nods.

“All right,” I sigh, leaning back in my seat. “Someone tell me the options.”

“Can’t hunt,” Marco mutters, frowning out at the distant outlines of buildings up the road. “We’re so close to town that the gunshots would draw attention. We could take our chances with one of those houses up the way and raid a kitchen.”

“What’s the risk factor of that versus just goin’ to a store?” Connie chimes in.

“You got the money to go to a store?” The exhaustion in Marco’s voice narrows to a sharp snap, his hand tightening on the door handle. “There’s bound to be a house with no one in it around here somewhere. We can take a shot, or we can starve. I’ll leave it to y’all to decide.”

“We break into a house, then someone eventually calls the law.” I’m so tired of being the voice of reason, especially when Marco looks at me like I’m on a personal mission to discredit him. “Even if we don’t get caught, it just means that the police will be on alert. We can’t go for the houses.”

Far across the campground, there’s a tent, silhouettes inside bedding down before their lantern turns off and plunges them into darkness. Something in my head clicks.

“We can’t steal food from a house,” I say carefully, “But bears steal food from campers all the time.”

“Wrap my ass in a bowtie and call me Teddy,” says Connie, lunging out of the car without question.

It takes about an hour of waiting to hear snoring from inside the tent, and another few minutes that involves Connie shimmying up a tree to dislodge a hanging knapsack of food, but we end up back on the road with a whole sandwich each, baked beans to share, and one entire, blessed chocolate bar. No caviar or rack of lamb on earth has ever tasted so good.

Marco actually looks a little more alive with some food in him, sunken cheeks giving way to an almost-smile at some stupid story Connie’s telling before he reaches down to grab my hand and looks over at me. “You wanna bed down for the night? There’s another campground near Mansfield, I think. Another hour or so.”

“I’m fine.”

“You look tired.”

“I’m  _ fine, _ Marco.” I have to be fine. I’m the last goddamn person in this car who’s holding on to any outward appearance of  _ fine _ .

He raises an eyebrow at me, looking so much like his old self that it hurts, but shrugs rather than pursue the issue. “Well, fine or not, we’re gonna need gas soon. And at some point we’ll have to get hold of a more recent newspaper. I wanna know what’s goin’ on in Dallas.”

“Well, one way to find out what’s really going on without having to trust the papers,” I offer, trying to squint through the headache brought on by the yellow circle of light from the headlights against the endless, inky dark. “I’m not sayin’ we call in any favors, but a quick call to the garage might clear up some questions.”

“You were the one who got all up in arms when I suggested it last time,” Connie squawks from the backseat. Marco doesn’t openly refute me, but his lips press into that thin line that says he’s holding back several good reasons why I shouldn’t do it.

“I got up in arms about askin’ Eren and Mick to bail us out of the Levi Ackerman shitshow,” I counter, edging the speedometer a little higher. “This is just a fact finding mission. Sasha, back me up here. Don’t you wanna hear what’s going on straight from the horse’s mouth?”

“Reckon it’s not that simple,” she says, doing a piss-poor job of backing me up. “Jean, honey, I know you wanna talk to Eren because he’s the person that makes all this insanity make sense for you, but we ain’t hardly in any position--”

“I just wanna know if Nettie’s all right,” I snap, and the conversation ends there for a long while.

I haven’t said as much out loud to anyone, but Telico and Maura Bodt’s face shook me clear to my bones. I haven’t been able to un-see her eyes since we drove off, the same round hazel as Marco’s, the same tragedy in them. There are plenty of reasons I can’t rest, but thinking of Ninette having to bear a tragedy I gave her is chief among them. This is the big history that we’re leaving behind, our grand legacy - making the people we love carry the weight of our names like a whole flock of albatrosses around their necks.

“I think it’s a bad idea,” Marco says in this absurdly measured voice, like _ I’m _ the one that we need to worry about breaking. “And I think we need to stop for the night before you end up drivin’ us off the road.”

“Agreed,” says Sasha.

“Agreed,” says Connie.

“I’m  _ fine! _ ”

“Jean,” says Marco, and it’s gentler than anything I’ve heard from him in a long while, gentle enough to make me slowly step on the brake and realise the aching tightness of my hands around the steering wheel, the way my whole body shakes, how my eyes burn with something that could be tears if I hadn’t forgotten how to cry. Slowly, carefully, Marco pries my fingers one by one from the wheel until he’s holding one of my hands in both of his, thumb brushing over the lines across my palm. “You don’t have to carry the whole world, darlin’. Take a breath for me.”

I breathe in. Breathe out. My breath, like the rest of me, shakes and threatens to fall apart. “I’m so tired.”

“So rest,” he says, like it’s so simple, like it’s  _ ever _ been that simple for us, and it’s a testament to how exhausted I am, that it almost seems like a reasonable solution.

“Here, switch me seats,” Connie says, popping the passenger side door open. “I’ll get us to Mansfield and we’ll regroup in the morning.”

A united front. God, it really is the only thing we’ve got going for us.

And maybe my mind won’t let me rest, but at a certain point of fatigue, your body will win out every time. I’ve still got Maura Bodt’s eyes haunting me all the way into my dreams, but somewhere between wherever the hell we are and Mansfield, I fall asleep with my head in Marco’s lap, his fingers lacing through my hair, and for one small second before unconsciousness claims me I can almost believe that this moment is something good.

* * *

I wake up in the same place I fell asleep, curled up against Marco, who’s snoring against the window, one hand still carded through my hair. There’s soft sunlight streaming in through the windshield, washing over Connie and Sasha, who are up front sleeping on each other’s shoulders. There’s one long moment of serenity that I allow myself to have before I make myself move, back to the infinitely more complicated world of the living. “We make it to Mansfield?”

All three of them jolt awake and Marco grabs for his gun, cursing, but stops once he’s more aware of his surroundings, blinking the sleep from his eye. “Mm? Oh, yeah. Stopped and got some gas, too. We should be all set for a straight shot to New Orleans.”

“What happens once we get there?” Sasha asks.

“It’s a big city,” Marco yawns. “Hopefully big enough to let us disappear for a week or two until we catch our boat. Maybe do a few small jobs for food money or see if Mick’s got any people there who can help us out. He said he’s got some guy up in Chicago who owes him a favor, Zachariah… Zimmerman? Zane? Some fancy-ass last name with a Z. Anyway, he’s big and scary enough to have fingers in criminal pies all over the country, so if we can find someone to drop a name to we might be set.”

“We thought we were set with Annie, too,” Connie points out, lighting a smoke. “Pardon me for not implicitly trusting every criminal your brother’s ever slept with.”

“Point one, how the hell do you know what ‘implicitly’ means?” Marco snipes, jumping out of the car and stretching his arms up over his head. “And point two, Mick never mentioned anything about sleeping with this particular contact.”

“It’s a person with power and influence who owes  _ Mick Bodt _ a favor,” Connie snorts. “I may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but I do know how to add two and two together.”

Marco and Connie bicker in circles for a while, and I try unsuccessfully to forget the bad dreams I had all night, and sitting in this abandoned campground in the middle of nowhere feels like anything but mercy. Sasha heats up the last of the pilfered food over a little campfire, but I can’t seem to find my appetite, staring off into space and wondering how long it’s going to be before I break like I did last night again. We can’t afford that weakness, and I can’t afford to not address the things that are causing it.

“Did we ever get a recent newspaper?” I ask, voice distant.

“Not yet, but there’s a general store a bit up the road,” Sasha answers, stirring a can of beans sitting in the coals with the blade of Connie’s pocket knife. “We were gonna swing through later and--”

“I got it.”

Marco breaks away from defending his brother’s nonexistent virtue to shoot me a puzzled look. “Darlin’, there ain’t no point in going alone.”

“If we go as a group we’re more obvious,” I tell him, brushing a kiss against his cheek before heading out to the road. He doesn’t bother following me. A cruel, irrational voice at the back of my mind whispers that Marco must be better at letting me go than I ever was at letting go of him. I tell the voice to shut up. It doesn’t listen.

The general store is less than a mile down a winding dirt road from the campsite, closer to what I assume is Mansfield, Louisiana. There’s no one inside save for a portly old shopkeeper up on a stepladder restocking shelves. As safe of a situation as it’s likely to get. I duck through the door and hide my face behind a display of road maps, praying that he doesn’t turn around. “Mornin’.”

“Be right with you, son,” the shopkeeper calls, huffing and puffing over a box of hair pomade tins stuck on a high shelf.

“No rush,” I answer, grabbing a newspaper off the counter and slipping it into the front of my jacket. “On my way down to see my aunt in Baton Rouge; just needed to call my mother and tell her I’m all right. Don’t suppose you have a telephone around?”

“Sure do; pay phone’s round the back.” I don’t even think he’s looked at me since I walked in. I know better than to feel like luck is on my side, but I’ve learned how to get out while you’re ahead.

“Thank you, sir, you have a nice day,” I rush out, heading out the door and around the side of the building before any passing cars can catch sight of me. The pay phone is a dilapidated old thing that’s leaning against the back wall of the general store for support next to a rusted-out gas pump, but it’s enough to get the job done. I scrape through my pockets for my last handful of change, trying to ignore the memories of Marco, Connie, and Sasha all telling me what a bad idea calling home would be.

But Maura Bodt’s empty stare and the idea of Nettie’s mirroring it haunts me more than their disapproval, and I jam the coins into the phone and grab the receiver. “Hello, operator?”

There’s something icy and not-quite-right prickling at the back of my neck as I wait for the call to connect, but I stomp it down a split second before there’s a click and a hiss and a  _ “Jaeger Automotive.” _

“Eren. Hey,” I sigh, relieved that I got to him without having to listen to an earful of bullshit from Michael.

Silence. A small bit of static on the line.

I frown and tap at the side of the pay phone. “Eren?”

_ “Why are you calling me, Jean.” _ It isn’t spoken like a question he wants answered. There’s something stiff and cold and not at all like him in his voice, and God, when will I learn to leave him alone and let him live his life, when will I stop running back to him with my problems, when, when, when.

I breathe out a sigh that trembles more than I want it to. “Look, I know that what happened was a shitshow, but I’m not calling to ask for help or anything, I just--”

_ “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” _

This isn’t like him. When Eren’s angry, he gets  _ angry, _ shouts and rages and calls you every nasty thing in the book. This frigid shutdown of anything I try to say is more in line with Marco’s anger, not Eren’s. Frowning, I lean forward and rest my forehead against the cool metal of the pay phone’s body, letting my eyes drift shut for a second. “I’m sorry. Okay? I’m sorry. We made it out okay. We’re in Mansfield, Louisiana, and after everything that happened, I just… I wanted to make sure Nettie’s all right.”

_ “She’s fine, but you shouldn’t… you can’t call me like this. Not when you’re doin’ what you do. You left your people behind, Jean, so you just need to accept that and move on. You hear me? You need. To move. On.” _ There’s something odd about the emphasis on the words, but my heart is too busy breaking to notice it. All the bridges I’ve burned, all the people I’ve pushed away, and the one that finally makes the realization cave in around me is Eren.

He loved me once. That’s all I can think of as I stand here and listen to him shutting me out.

“Is this coming from you or from Mick?” I ask, unable to hide the hurt in the question.

On the other end of the line, Eren lets out a strangled little cough.  _ “Who?” _

“Look, I know Mick ain’t my biggest fan but you know I’d never--”

_ “I don’t know who you’re talking about, Jean,” _ Eren cuts me off again, sounding strangely like he’s about to cry.  _ “I’ll take care of Nettie. But you need to listen to me and move on. You  _ have _ to move on, okay? Don’t call this number again.” _

Click.

I don’t know how long I stand there, staring at the dead reciever in my hand. I need to move on.

When have I ever known how to do that?

The closest I get to moving on is hanging up the phone and shuffling back down the road, through the trees to our campsite where Connie’s whittling something out of a tree branch and Sasha’s washing our clothes in the nearby creek and Marco’s waiting for me to come back with a worried look and an arm around my shoulders. “You okay, darlin’?”

No. I don’t know how to move on.

“Yeah,” I lie, pulling the newspaper out of my jacket and handing it to him. “Got in and out just fine. No one saw me.”

“You get any food?” Connie asks, carving off a long sliver of wood from the branch in his hand.

“Shut up, Connie,” Marco says without any real venom, scanning the front page of the paper where there’s an article right under our now-infamous beach picture. “Says here that the boys in Dallas are reformulating their strategy, which sounds to me an awful lot like they’ve got no idea where we are. Let’s put it to a vote. All for staying here tonight and gettin’ some much needed shut-eye?”

“You’re sure we’re off the map?” Connie asks, picking something out from under his fingernail with the point of his knife.

“As much as we can be. No one saw us leave Shreveport, and no one saw us come here. If Jean feels safe about his trip to the general store then I’d say yeah, we’re as safe as we’re like to get.”

“A good night’s sleep sounds good to me, then,” Connie shrugs.

Sasha nods in unison with him and leans back against a rock with a weary little sigh. “It’s pretty here. We could all do with some fresh air and clean clothes.”

“And you could use some more rest,” Marco adds, brushing a displaced lock of hair back from my forehead and frowning at me. “You sure you’re all right?”

“I’ll be okay.” I wish I could believe it.

The rest of the day is lazy and uneventful enough to leave me very unsettled. Connie whittles a whole troupe of wooden figurines, Sasha washes every scrap of clothing we have to our names, and Marco lays with me in the grass and shows me how to do different bird calls, bringing larks and finches and whippoorwills into the branches over our heads. He looks so sad when they fly away. I don’t ask him why.

The sunset turns the sky red, and I roll over onto my side, head tucked between his shoulder and chin, and I whisper, “Tell me something good.”

“I love you,” he says, and there’s a little bit of comfort in the fact that he doesn’t hesitate with it, just loops an arm over my waist and leans back a little so he can get me off his blind side enough to look at me. “That’s good, right?”

“Yeah,” I tell him, watching a pair of nightingales take off into the sky and feeling my eyelids grow heavy against my will. “Yeah, that’s good.”

I wake up to a hand clamped firmly over my mouth.

A yell lodges somewhere in my throat, cut off by Marco, face lit all scarred and silver in the waning moonlight of early morning, shaking his head. “Don’t. They’re in the woods.”

My heart jumps into my throat so fast I almost choke on it, fighting for air as Marco slowly lifts his hand away. “How did they find us?”

“I don’t know,” he whispers, staring off into the trees where floating beams of light are edging steadily closer. “I don’t know.”

I don’t know either, until I do.

The newspaper saying the law was trying a new strategy. The clipped, cold voice on the other end of the phone line. The claims that he didn’t know who or what I was talking about.  _ You need. To move. On. _

They tapped the phones in the garage. Eren wasn’t shutting me out.

He was trying to warn me.

“The car,” I rasp out, finding Connie and Sasha’s dark silhouettes as they inch toward us in the dark. “How are we gonna get to the car, it’s across the road…”

“We’ve gotta run for it,” says Connie, eyes wide and dark with panic as he listens to the crunch of boots on underbrush drawing ever closer.

Sasha lets out a horrified sob that she muffles into her hand. “The second we run, they’ll see us--”

“We stay here and we’re  _ dead! _ ” Marco cuts her off with a hiss, clicking the safety off on his revolver. “On three, run and try to stay low. One…”

I scramble in my pockets for the car keys, heartbeat loud and wet in my own ears.

“Two… Three, go, go,  _ go! _ ”

I grab Marco’s hand and  _ lunge _ forward into a sprint, heading for the road and the car. The night erupts into a cacophony of shouts and footfalls and then gunshots, whizzing past my head and carving pieces out of tree trunks as they go. We’re ten yards away from the car when something chilling cuts over the chaos, a pained, animal scream that stops me in my tracks.

A woman’s scream.

Time skips; it’s dark and I can’t breathe and my shaking hands are fighting a losing battle with the keys in the ignition. Somewhere nearby Marco is shouting “Get her in the back, c’mon,  _ c’mon, _ ” and the engine turns over with a merciful purr and then there’s a hand gripping my shoulder,  _ “Go, Jean, go!” _

The tires scream against the road but not nearly as loud as Sasha in the back seat, letting out wails of agony while Connie tries to put pressure on her blood-soaked back with one of the shirts she’d washed so carefully earlier in the day. Somewhere behind us are sirens, but we left too fast for them to catch up - the thought strikes me that they never intended for us to make it to the car alive.

“Oh,  _ Jesus, _ it hurts,” Sasha sobs.

“Bastards got her in the shoulder,” Connie seethes, squinting through the dark and trying to trace the source of the bleeding. “Don’t think they hit anything vital, but there’s no exit wound. Bullet’s still in there. We’re gonna need to get it out when we stop.”

Marco swears under his breath. “We don’t have anything to do it with, Connie, no bandages or alcohol or--”

“THEN WE GO TO A GODDAMN STORE,” Connie roars. “I don’t care if we’ve gotta stick the damn place up, she’s been fuckin’  _ shot, _ Marco!”

For a while, there’s just tense silence and Sasha’s whimpering and the roar of the engine, cornfields and sad little houses blurring past the windows. The sun climbs high enough in the sky that I can see far down the road ahead and behind us. No cars, but no other signs of civilization either.

“It doesn’t hurt anymore,” Sasha says weakly.

Connie lets out a stream of profanity and presses a hand to her forehead. “I think she’s goin’ into shock. Baby girl, you gotta stay awake for me, okay? I’m right here, look at me…”

“I wanna go home, Con,” she answers him after another beat, barely above a whisper. “Can we go home?”

“We’ll go wherever you want, honey, I just need you to keep talkin’ to me, okay?” I can only see a sliver of her in the rearview, but she looks shaky and sick. Connie doesn’t look much better. “Jean, if you can drive this damn thing any faster--”

“There’s a gas station up ahead, I can see it!” I shout back, veering sharply into the drive and hopping out of the still-running car. One calming breath, two, we can still salvage this without anyone else getting shot because of me.

The shopkeeper’s bent over something on the floor behind the register, only the back of a tailored jacket visible, and I’m too busy trying to will myself to breathe to really question it, hands shaking as I point at items behind the counter’s glass front. “Hi there, can I have, uh… some iodine, a couple rolls of those bandages, and a pair of tweezers, please?”

“Absolutely,” Erwin Smith says, standing up and depositing the items I’d asked for on the countertop and pulling a gun out of a holster strapped under his jacket. “That’ll be a buck fifty.”

_ “Shit--” _ I wheeze, hand going to my waistband to grab my own gun.

“I wouldn’t do that,” he says, too casually, pulling the hammer back on his revolver and giving me a look that  _ dares _ me to try to be quicker on the draw. “What I would do, son, is put both hands on that counter so you and I can have a little chat, and I’d do it in the next five seconds.”

“What…” I whisper, not understanding.

“Four. Three.”

I put my hands on the counter. There’s a fine line between bravery and stupidity that I’m not interested in walking.

He’s a different man than the one that offered me an easy out back in the diner in Lufkin. There’s not a scrap of sympathy in his eyes, just cold calculation and a controlled rage that sparks a little brighter as he nods towards the window. This is the man that Marco was afraid of. That I’m afraid of now. “Are the others outside?”

I swallow hard. “You’ve got me, and it doesn’t look like you have backup. Just take me in and call it a win.”

“That wasn’t an answer, Jean. We’re gonna be honest with each other, you and I, or things are liable to get painful.  _ Are the others outside? _ ”

“Yeah, but you go out there, they’ll be up the road before you can catch up.”

He doesn’t seem too bothered by that, stroking his thumb speculatively down the grip of the gun. There’s an intricate  _ LA  _ inlaid there in mother-of-pearl. Smith nods at the medical supplies on the counter. “Someone got hurt. Who was it?”

“Sasha,” I tell him, and that’s honesty I don’t feel bad about, because if any one of us is likely to get mercy, it’s her. “They got her in the shoulder and the bullet’s lodged. She’s going into shock.”

“Shame,” he says, this sour look pulling at his face. “Her family said she was a nice girl before all this. Sang in the church choir, did up folks’ laundry for free if they were out looking for work. That bullet wasn’t meant for her. You, on the other hand…”

Terror stabs down my spine like a knife as he fiddles with the gun again, looking at me like he’s not sure whether I should die quickly and painfully or slowly and even more painfully. “Well, we’re having this talk ‘cause I figured I’d give you a chance to explain yourself.”

And it’s stupid, it’s so stupid that I’m more scared than I’ve ever been and my mind spirals back to fairy tales, to Cheshire Cat smiles and the life I feel like I never even had before I went headfirst down the rabbit hole.

_ “‘I can't explain myself, I'm afraid, sir,’ said Alice, ‘because I'm not myself, you see…’” _

The light slanting in through the gritty window catches the inlay on the gun.  _ LA. _

That’s what he wants me to answer for.

“I tried to stop him,” I offer, but it’s met with nothing but that same cold stare, and I remember that we’re supposed to be honest with each other. “But just because I don’t agree with what Marco did doesn’t mean I don’t understand it. Marco lost his eye and five months of his life and… and somethin’ else, after that first time at the bank. Somethin’ in him just… stopped. Anyone who went through that would want justice.”

“Levi Ackerman’s death didn’t have a  _ damn _ thing to do with justice. Levi Ackerman followed orders in an effort to bring in two wanted criminals. Marco lost his eye, and Levi Ackerman’s in a  _ morgue _ ,” Smith lashes back, and it comes out as an honest-to-god  _ snarl _ before he stops, takes a deep breath, collects himself. And that’s even more terrifying, how he levels the revolver up against my forehead, a circle of cold steel against my skin, and he doesn’t even blink. “Way I see it, son, that ain’t justice. Now, if you were to die alone and scared and separated from the man you love…  _ that _ would be justice.”

I’m too scared to think about what that means. I’m too convinced that it’s all about to be over to do anything other than screw my eyes shut and shake my brain, beg it  _ tell me something good, tell me something good, _ rewarded with fleeting images - Eren laughing, my mom in the front row at my band concerts, Nettie on my shoulders, Marco, Marco, Marco, Marco singing  _ summertime and the livin’ is easy, _ Marco smiling, Marco spinning me around in the back of Annie’s club, Marco kissing me awake on a late Saturday morning somewhere outside Topeka, Marco’s hand in mine beside the ocean,  _ I love you. That’s good, right _ …

It wasn’t a bad life, I decide, sucking in a shaky breath that I resign to be my last. There were plenty of bad things in it, but it wasn’t a bad life. I was loved. That’s more than some people ever get.

There’s a click and a rustle, and then nothing.

I crack one eye open, and Erwin Smith is adjusting his jacket after tucking the gun back into its holster. “Go.”

I stand there and blink at him. “What?”

“Go,” he says, bagging up the medical supplies on the counter and nodding towards the door.

“Why, so you can shoot me in the back?”

“I don’t shoot people in the back,” he says coolly, handing me the bag and leaning back against the shelves behind the counter. He might as well be making small talk. “Trust me, boy, when I shoot you, I’ll be looking you right in the eyes.”

“Then why--”

“I want you to  _ run, _ Jean,” he says, and  _ there’s  _ the savagery again, blazing like an ice storm in him as he reaches across the counter and grabs my shirt collar, practically hauling me up onto the polished surface. There’s nothing analytical in his eyes now. Just murder. Just rage. Just the same look in Marco’s eye when he blew Levi Ackerman’s brains out. “I want you and Marco to run as fast and far as you can, and I want to hunt the pair of you down like  _ animals. _ I want you both to look behind you every other step and never get another night of sleep for the rest of your miserable lives, and maybe,  _ maybe _ when I’m standing over your  _ cold corpses _ ,  _ then  _ we can talk about justice.”

I can’t speak. I can’t breathe. I can’t do anything but stare at him when he lets go of me and takes a step back.

_ “Go!” _

That, I can do. I take the medical supplies and go straight back out to the car and slam on the gas. I don’t say a word for the next fifteen miles.

“The hell took you so long?!” Connie snaps when I pull off the road into a barren field, laying a blanket down and helping him and Marco get Sasha out of the car.

“Ran into Erwin Smith,” I say, still numb, fingers shaking on the iodine bottle’s cap. “We had a talk. He’ll be behind us. We need to hurry.”

“He let you go?” Marco asks disbelievingly.

I shake my head and sit down beside Sasha so I can hold her hand. This is going to be fast and messy and it’s going to hurt. “He’s not tryin’ to do us any favors. Sasha, you can squeeze as hard as you want, okay? Yell if you need to. They already know where we are.”

The bullet comes out of Sasha’s shoulder with a lot of blood and screaming, and we end up back in the car doing seventy down the back roads, taking random turns. Connie’s hands are gripping the steering wheel so hard it creaks, I’m on lookout duty, and Marco is in the back with Sasha trying to keep her awake and keep pressure on the wound There are crows circling overhead, like they’re waiting for whatever carrion comes out of this. I get so distracted watching them that I almost don’t notice the police car parked across the road up ahead, the two officers getting out with guns drawn.

“Jean, we gotta--” Marco starts, but I don’t let him finish, pulling the pistol out of my waistband and sticking it out the open window. Safety off. One shot. Two.

We drive past two bodies, and the crows stay behind. I’m begging my brain,  _ tell me something good, tell me something good _ , and it won’t give me a damn thing. I’ve put so many bad things into a good life that I’m not sure where the balance tipped and made me into something else, made me into someone who can kill two people on instinct alone. Sasha sobs in pain and horror. Connie stares out the windshield. Marco looks at me like he doesn’t recognize me. I look in the rearview mirror like I don’t recognize myself.

I think of Marco’s hand in mine and the sound of ocean waves.

_ “‘It’s no use going back to yesterday,’ said Alice, ‘because I was a different person then.’” _


End file.
